This Is So Gay

Becoming Real Boys (and Girls)

2012-01-28T12:32:00.004-06:00

A P.S. to the previous post, because it was already long enough. In Andrew O'Hehir's review of Weekend he wrote:

I’ve long maintained that gay-straight cinematic equality will finally arrive when a character’s sexuality, however interesting or titillating it may be, is not seen as delivering an important message about tolerance or self-empowerment or some other boring abstraction. I liked both “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Kids Are All Right” a lot, but there’s no doubt they’re both finely crafted teachable moments. The examples I relish are few and far between: Kristin Scott Thomas as the protagonist’s lesbian best friend in “Tell No One,” Kieran Culkin as the title character’s gay roommate in “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” Demetri Martin as the gay hero of “Taking Woodstock” (although his character’s sexuality is, if anything, too irrelevant).

This is a textbook case of the liberalism that Martha Shelley addressed in "Gay Is Good", quoted at the end of the previous post: it's okay to be different as long as you aren't different! In fact, let's not even mention your difference, but I'll talk endlessly about my normality, which isn't a difference at all!

It's also where the paradox I mentioned before comes in, the binary of universality/particularity. If I understand the concept, universality and particularity deconstruct each other: a particular person is still a person, a member of the category or species. You can't have an individual if there isn't a group that he or she belongs to, which connects to what I've written before about individualism and group identity. Critics of "the Western concept of gay identity," for example, claim that it encourages individualism, but gay identity entails my recognizing that I am not a freakish singular aberration but a member of a class of people. This is true of any identity. Even if I give you what might be called my individual identity, embodied on my passport, it represents a constellation of identities: my family, nuclear and extended; the community, along with the state, nation, and planet where I live; the species I belong to; my sex; my age; my height and weight, and so on. By pointing to any of these, I am declaring my membership in various groups, not my uniqueness, and my uniqueness is inseparable from, and perfectly compatible with, my being one among six (or is it seven now?) billions.

So, back to O'Hehir's recommendation for equality in films. Yes, we need films with gay characters who are unmarked in the same way that straight characters are unmarked. Still, until human beings arrive at some kind of utopia, differences among people will still matter, socially and therefore artistically. One approach has been genre fiction, which enables writers to give gay characters something to do besides "be gay": to solve murders, say, or to fly to distant galaxies. Mysteries are a better case to examine here, because they generally take place now, in the society we know. It's not necessary to pretend that we live in a society where being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered is no big deal: in genre fiction the problems we have to grapple with are not absent or ignored, they're just dislodged from the center of the story by the genre requirement that the story be about something else, like solving a crime. They are still among the complications that the protagonist has to deal with.

I disagree very strongly with O'Hehir's dismissal of social issues as a "boring abstraction": I think that only a straight white male could make that error. (P.S. Well, not quite: any member of a privileged group -- say, a white female, a black heterosexual, a gay while male -- could make it too.) On the contrary, far from being abstract they are stubbornly concrete. There are other ways to handle them in art than treating them as merely "teachable moments." But to pretend that they don't have to be handled is to leave reality altogether. A gay character who never has to confront homophobia, an African-American character who never has to confront racism, a woman who never has to confront sexism would have to live in another society altogether; hence the usefulness of science fiction and fantasy, which can postulate such a society and explore its ramifications. (Despite the series' severe limitations, the "teachable moments" aspect of Star Trek ended after the first few programs of the first season, since part of its point was that it depicted a future where an black woman and an Asian man could serve on a starship without their "race" being an issue the program had to address. Spock's half-breed alienness was something else again, since it was often mentioned and joked about, but it may have served partly as a distraction, a safety valve for the other differences that weren't on the table.)

One of the strangest exchanges I ever had online happened when I advocated specifically gay pop music. It was in a queer online forum, so I was amazed when other gay people jumped all over the proposal, on the grounds that it wasn't universal. How universal do you want to be? I asked: a song will still be sung by a male or female singer. Even that is bad, someone answered: Madonna wishes she didn't have to occupy a female position in her songs... The solution, I suppose, would be the vocoder, an artificial voice. But I'm still struck by the hatred, or at least revulsion, for human bodies and their differences expressed by the people I was debating. They really seemed to want to get rid of human beings and replace us by mass-produced robots that would be perfectly identical to each other. Or maybe (it seemed likely for some of these people) their own internalized homophobia was so intense that they couldn't bear to hear a man singing a love song to another man, a woman to another woman -- or even a man singing to a woman or vice versa. A machine singing to another machine was okay, though. In which case, why bother? How could these people even bear to touch another human body, let alone have sex with one, with its repulsive lack of universality?

The question comes down to how you read a story (be it on film, in print, or some other medium). It's summed up very well in the story Nicola Griffith tells -- I quoted it here -- about the agent who couldn't understand why Griffith's second novel was about lesbians too.

"Well," she said, "in Ammonite Marghe had a girlfriend because she had no choice, poor thing. But why does Lore like girls?"

"Because she's a dyke, Fran," I said, and I fired her.

The SF grandmaster Poul Anderson once asked, derisively but in all seriousness, why you'd want to put a woman character into a story except as a love interest. Stories are about men: women are merely accessories. Marge Piercy satirized the idea in a way that comes uncomfortably close to reality (as satire should) in a fictional review by a male reviewer of a book of feminist poetry (from her novel Braided Lives [Summit Books, 1982], 400):

Miss Stuart's seventh volume of poetry is crammed with reductionist simplistic snippets of women's lib cant. In describing a series of male/female encounters in which women are injured, raped, maimed, Stuart is unsympathetic to male needs. Individual poems stress only the woman's role and anguish, instead of taking a balanced view. Only the poems about good sex transcend this morbid polemical bias. When we men denigrate women, compare them to mud, death, meat, sows, sloughs, sewers, traps, toilets, when we equate them with mortality, contingency, nature, when we put down women who put out and women who don't, we are merely being universal. Miss Stuart is guilty of special pleading. In art there can be no special pleading for women. Her poetry is uterine and devoid of thrust. Her volume is wet, menstruates, and carries a purse in which it can't find anything. -- Sydney Craw

(Which reminds me: it's about time I reread all of Piercy's work.)

The theme also turns up in the stories African-American pioneers in science fiction like Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany have to tell about white editors who couldn't accept black characters in stories unless the stories were about race, which could only (and conveniently) be a very small subarea of the genre. The iconoclastic white editor of Analog sf magazine, John W. Campbell, rejected Delany’s 1968 novel Nova for serialization, “explaining that while he pretty much liked everything else about it, he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character.” Campbell was famous for his rationalism, and for publishing stories critical of religion; but his daring went only so far. A few years later, another white sf editor told Octavia Butler that “he didn’t think that blacks should be included in science fiction stories because they changed the character of the stories; that if you put in a black, all of a sudden the focus is on this person. He stated that if you were going to write about some kind of racial problem, that would be absolutely the only reason he could see for including a black.” A black character couldn’t be Everyman, let alone Everywoman, but a white character, no matter how atypical, could. It was okay to allegorize race by using robots, extraterrestrials, or genetically-modified chimpanzees to represent The Negro Problem, but an actual, concrete person of color as communications officer -- or, The Force forbid -- captain of a starship? What would be the point of such extremism?

By now there have been a good many movies in which a character's sexuality is not seen solely "as delivering an important message about tolerance or self-empowerment or some other boring abstraction," though it may deliver such messages as well. I think O'Hehir's examples are carefully chosen to be marginal, and they reflect the way he sees gay characters, not the ways they can be seen. Yes, I have seen glbt movies which I thought were excessively preachy, though that could easily be due to my inability to read them differently; or it could be Sturgeon's Law. But if you decide at the outset to view a film that way, you may miss what else is going on in it. A favorite example of mine is Torch Song Trilogy, which probably owed some of its popularity as a Broadway play and as a film to its preachiness, but Arnold, the central character, is first of all a character, a person with a story to tell, a person worth knowing, not despite but including all his differences. Or consider the pre-New Queer Cinema independent film Parting Glances, with a gay male couple at the center, and a Person With AIDS nearby, surrounded by their straight friends and co-workers -- just like Keep the Lights On as Andrew O'Hehir describes it!

Are these characters (and many others) universal? Only if they succeed in being particular first.

As Martha Shelley pointed out in "Gay Is Good," heterosexuals are our litmus test. We're human beings among ourselves until they turn their liberal gaze on us, trying to decide whether to let us in to Universality. But it's not their decision to make.

How Are the Doughy Fallen

2012-01-28T09:52:00.006-06:00

So President Obama was delivered of a State of the Union address this week, ably dissected as usual by Whatever It Is I'm Against It. (Can you believe it? When George W. Bush shambled off into history and Obama replaced him in the Oval Office, WIIIAI worried that he would have trouble finding good satirical material in the new President's speeches and behavior. That didn't last long, and besides, we'll always have the Republican debates.)

Roy Edroso's mission is to find funny and stupid material in the writings of right-wing Republican politicians, pundits, and bloggers -- shooting fish in a barrel, in effect. Occasionally he strays, as when he calls the 2012 SOTU "snoozy." But that's only on the way to making fun of National Review's legacy blogger Jonah Goldberg, known to the wits at alicublog as Doughy Pantload, for attacking Obama's celebration of the American military as an encroachment of Liberal Fascist Collectivism, blah blah blah.

It seems, though, that even liberal Democrats are losing enthusiasm for the increasingly unrewarding task of exalting Obama. One commenter began his attack on Goldberg by describing Obama's militarism as "a simple--and bullshit--rhetorical point in a staged Speech Event." Partly that's just rhetoric itself, of course: you pretend that what your guy said was no big deal compared to your opponent's crazy ranting: "... part of a secret plan by a Kenyan anti-colonialist to militarize America, because liberals." But still. After years of Obama's devotees telling us what a great orator he is, "a simple--and bullshit--rhetorical point in a staged Speech Event" strikes a note of exhaustion. Okay, yeah, he's a pompous blowhard. You wanna make something of it? But there's nothing we can do, because Republicans. Take up your pom-poms, girls -- it's going to be a long nine months.

Is the Gaze Gay?

2012-01-27T15:56:00.009-06:00

I won't hold Andrew O'Hehir responsible for the title of today's review of Ira Sach's new film, Keep the Lights On, which premiered at Sundance. The title Salon's editors chose was "A great gay film, or just a great film?" There's no need to, since the openly heterosexual critic makes enough such blunders in the body of the review itself. At the end of the first paragraph, for example, he reports that the film has "plenty of explicit gay sex, but no NC-17 material," by which he presumably means no visible erections or penetration, though the word "explicit" is rapidly losing all meaning anyway except as a dog whistle to censorious fundamentalists and horny teenage boys.

Soon after, O'Hehir writes that Keep the Lights On is

a loving but entirely fearless portrait of gay urban life at the turn of the millennium, seen through the prism of one dysfunctional love affair. In fact, this movie may test how far the gay community has come on issues of self-representation. While it seems unlikely that bigots and homophobes would actively seek this film out (except, you know, on the sly and stuff), any who do see it could certainly cherry-pick details to support the thesis that Erik’s entire cadre of humanity are degenerates.

It's also "absolutely not a freak show", and

Like Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend,” another recent film that feels like a step forward or a step away from the “queer cinema” of the ’90s, this isn’t a movie about identity or coming out or facing oppression. It’s an unstinting relationship drama — perhaps consciously modeled on Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage” — about two guys who fall in love in the most tolerant and diverse metropolis in America, surrounded by supportive gay and straight friends, and manage to screw it all up with drugs and craziness and horndoggery. You could choose to interpret the movie as being about how people like Paul and Erik are ghettoized by an uncaring, heterocentric society or whatever, but frankly there’s nothing like that in the film.

Ah yes, Weekend. I still haven't had a chance to see it, and it doesn't seem to have a US DVD release scheduled yet. That was the one that apparently I'm not supposed to see, by the filmmaker's express criterion that no one shouldn't be interested in films that don't mirror their life circumstances in every particular, but I still intend to see it. Eventually.

What really gets to me me in those remarks is that the claims O'Hehir makes for Keep the Lights On are exactly what "the 'queer cinema' of the '90s" supposedly did: the films that drew critical and audience attention in that period tossed out concerns about "self-representation" and attempted to move beyond "identity or coming out or facing oppression." I take it that O'Hehir has never seen The Living End, Totally F***ed Up,The Doom Generation, Nowhere, Swoon, My Father Is Coming, Female Misbehavior, High Art, My Own Private Idaho, The Watermelon Woman, Go Fish, Poison, Zero Patience, Lilies, No Skin Off My Ass, Better Than Chocolate -- to name only some English-language, US or Canadian-made contributions to the Queer Cinema of the 90s. It seems that O'Hehir doesn't know what he's talking about.

O'Hehir said a lot of the same things when he reviewed Weekend last year, though then he merely dismissed the queer cinema of the 90s:

As in so many other areas of culture, the 1980s were way ahead of the present: Pedro Almodóvar’s “Law of Desire” and Stephen Frears’ “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” for instance, anticipated this trend by 20 years or more. But if those movies helped spawn the self-involved, studiously transgressive art-house ghetto called “queer cinema” (which never reached beyond a tiny minority of the LGBT public), they had startlingly little effect on the world of mainstream cinema, which remains committed to tried and true models, even in the age of gay marriage and openly gay military personnel. Gays in the movies can be suffering heroes, objects of pity, opportunities for the audience to demonstrate its superior compassion and/or dishy best pals. They are hardly ever just people.

This was at least marginally better informed, though it underplays the vehemence of Hollywood homophobia, what he calls "the world of mainstream cinema." (I think he's confused about Stephen Frears's oeuvre: the primarily heterosexual Sammy and Rosie Get Laid had minor lesbian characters, but it was the earlier My Beautiful Laundrette that broke new ground in its handling of its central male couple.) Cable TV, from Tales of the City to The Wire, has done much better with GLBT material than Hollywood.

But the earlier piece also tells a very different story about queer cinema than O'Hehir told today. He may have been right about the much smaller audience that those films reached -- it would have been even smaller without the advent of home video, and it still says as much about what Hollywood refused and still refuses to do as about the limitations of Queer Cinema -- but that doesn't explain or excuse his misrepresentation of what they were trying to do. It would help to remember that presenting queers as "just people" is still, twenty years later, an avant-garde and arthouse stance as far as "mainstream Hollywood" is concerned, which determines not just production but distribution.

That Keep the Lights On made its debut -- "came out," as we homosexuals might say -- at Sundance is a help for distribution, but it's worth remembering that several of those dwellers in "the self-involved, studiously transgressive art-house ghetto called 'queer cinema'" also broke out as Sundance: Poison in 1991, followed the next year by Swoon, The Living End, The Hours and Times, and later by Go Fish. Other notable independent gay films, like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, were developed there. The Sundance imprimatur won them attention outside the gay press. So it turns out that Keep the Lights On is not a breakthrough, but merely the latest in an honorable and well-established tradition.

Now let me go back to the article's title, which may not have been O'Hehir's choice but still expresses his assumptions. Imagine substituting "black" or "Jewish" or "women's" for "gay" in that rhetorical question; better yet, substitute "men's" or "American." So much depends on whom you think you're asking. "A great American film, or just a great film?" "A great men's film, or just a great film?" To some extent, just asking the question discredits the asker. The answer will depend not on the film but on the viewer's willingness to identify with characters different than him or herself, a capacity that seems more limited among heterosexual American males, especially white ones. There are of course many exceptions, but as a general rule that's the group that covers its ears, clamps its eyes shut, and hisses "No!" when offered stories about the Other. (If Andrew Haigh, the man behind Weekend, were straight, he'd fit right in with that mindset.) There's nothing wrong with wanting also to have stories about people like yourself, it's the impulse behind "minority" art, but when you can't or won't enter into different worlds, something is wrong with you. It could be racism, it could be sexism, or homophobia, or xenophobia; it could be a hidebound inability or refusal to experience different film or storytelling modes.

I admit there's a paradox, though. The other side is that we need to recognize the particularity of all art, and indeed of all human experience. Just sticking with cinema: Every film will be a men's film, an American film, a white film, a black film, a Chinese film, a women's film, a gay film, a lesbian film, a heterosexual film, and so on and on, at the same time that it's also just a film. Everyone has blind spots, so no one will be able to appreciate everything, even the good films. (On the other hand, it should be obvious that badness doesn't necessarily interfere with people's appreciation of many films -- not just as a Good Bad Movie, but as their favorite movie of all time.) No film is truly "universal" in its subject matter; every particularity is also human. And every film has politics -- makes assumptions about power and its lack, about money and its lack, about the structures that limit and enable human life; but that's another post.

The best formulation of this paradox, or at any rate the first I encountered, was in "Gay Is Good," a Gay Liberation broadside by Martha Shelley, probably from 1970 or 1971:

And I am personally sick of liberals who say they don't care who sleeps with whom, it what's you do outside of bed that counts. This is what homosexuals have been trying to get straights to understand for years. Well, it's too late for liberalism. Because what I do outside of bed may have nothing to do with what I do outside -- but my consciousness is branded, is permeated with homosexuality. For years I have been branded with your label for me. The result is that when I am among gays or in bed with another woman, I am a person, not a lesbian. When I am observable to the straight world, I become gay. You are my litmus paper.

Sigh. Written over forty years ago. Still relevant.

Just You Wait, 'Enry 'Itchings, Just You Wait!

2012-01-26T16:07:00.014-06:00

Okay, I'm back! I lucked out: the shop fixed my laptop in two days. (I tripped on the power cord the other night, and the computer slipped off the table -- a low table -- onto the floor. It didn't seem to be hurt: it wasn't until the next morning that I discovered that it had landed on the jack where the power plug enters, knocking something loose inside. I gather this is a not infrequent problem with newer Toshiba laptops. Luckily, it's easy to fix, though the labor was ninety percent of the cost. Of course.)

Anyway, I hardly know where to begin, so I'll start with today and work backwards. I'm eighty-five pages into The Language Wars: A History of Proper English (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2011) by Henry Hitchings. Hitchings isn't an academic linguist, but he's done his research, and I'm enjoying his book. I've learned, for example, that two seventeenth-century French writers, "Joachim du Bellay and Antoine de Rivarol, believed that French was the closest language to the single tongue that was supposed to have existed before Babel" (18). This is something to add to my collection, like the seventeenth-century Jesuit who proved that Jesus and his disciples spoke Latin, the language of the saints and angels in Heaven; or the contemporary Turkish scholar, known to an acquaintance of mine, who believes that Turkish was the original human language. A high school teacher of mine told us about the European king who had a number of infants raised without their nurses talking to them to see what language they naturally would speak if no one taught them one; he believed it would be Hebrew. The babies all died, my teacher told us, without learning to speak, because human beings need that human interaction. And so on. Of course we all know that the original language was English, like in the King James Version of the Bible. If it was good enough for Adam and Eve, it's good enough for me!

Hitchings navigates cautiously between the Scylla of linguistic prescriptivism (which as he says should really be called proscriptivism, because it's more concerned with telling people what not to do than with teaching them what's correct) and the Charybdis of descriptivism (which purports simply to describe how people actually speak and write their language). He recognizes that neither position can really stand by itself, though I think I'm going to have a bone or two to pick with his notion, enshrined in the book's subtitle, of "proper" English and the importance of propriety.

I'm probably more sympathetic to propriety as Hitchings sees it than I would have been when I was younger. Language -- which is much more than mere communication -- is a form of interaction with other people, and that requires all parties involved to be considerate of each other. I try to be aware of the person I'm talking to, which doesn't mean talking down to them; it means attending to what they say and how they react to what I say. (In my experience, it's usually more educated, petit bourgeois types who perceive me as talking down to them, and they may be right. Blue-collar people usually don't. That's partly because of my own lower-class background, I suppose, and partly because I don't have much respect for people whose own self-respect depends so much on looking down on others. I'll return to this in a moment.) On the other hand, I'm well-indoctrinated with standard, "proper" English, mainly through my own voracious consumption of my language in its printed form. It's my default setting, so (like Henry Hitchings) I speak and write in that mode, even though I recognize that it's conventional, not "natural." I do the same in Spanish, by the way, and I"m glad I learned Spanish formally in the classroom; I added informal and "vulgar" Spanish much later, when I learned it from native speakers, but if I meet people with whom formal speech is appropriate I won't embarrass myself. Too much.

That's an important to point to stress, I think, because numerous reviewers I've read online dwell on Hitchings's fine prose style. There's nothing inconsistent about writing standard English while recognizing that the standard is a convention, more or less arbitrary and certainly not logical, than there is in playing chess by the rules while recognizing that the rules are conventions, more or less arbitrary and certainly not logical.

I'll watch more closely as I proceed through the book, but I think that Hitchings himself believes, or writes as though he believes, that descriptivism means "anything goes." It doesn't. Describing a language necessarily includes describing how words are used, and with whom. That seems to be true of the notoriously descriptivist dictionaries, like Webster's Third New International, that excited so much proscriptivist fury in the 1960s: they specified appropriate usage, but with different terminology than people were used to. For that matter, I have the impression that, while speakers of non-standard English dialects may see themselves as not speaking proper or "good" English, they are not descriptivists themselves. (Just as people who essentialize their sexual practices with different categories than we use in the West are not social constructionists.) They have their own ideas of proper grammar and pronunciation, and if they have to deal with someone who varies too much from those -- say, a non-native speaker -- they will insist that they aren't speaking English at all.

So, for example, one Barton Swaim, reviewing The Language Wars for the Wall Street Journal, writes:

The trouble with descriptivism—the idea that the grammarian's job is to describe the language, not to issue judgments about propriety—isn't that it's theoretically unsound. Rules really are just conventions. The trouble with descriptivism is that it's inhuman. People will always want to know the right way to say a thing. The secretary writing a letter or the corporate communications drone writing a press release doesn't care whether "impact" as a verb is "generally accepted," as modern usage manuals put it; he wants to know if using "impact" as a verb will make him sound stupid.

Henry Hitchings, in "The Language Wars," seems to appreciate the fact that propriety is part of human life, even if it's given no room in the lifeless principles of linguistics. He has plenty of criticisms for those "inveterate fusspots" who understand just enough English grammar to lord it over their supposed inferiors, but he isn't so naïve as to think we can be rid of "rules" in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

Did Swaim realize that this "make[s] him sound stupid"? First, he confuses grammarians with linguists, though that's relatively trivial. Second, it's precisely those "corporate communications drones" who use "impact" as a verb (though it's completely proper to do so) without concern for the language they are supposedly desecrating. Third, why does Swaim think that grammarians are qualified to "issue judgments about propriety"? That's really for people -- those of us who use our language every day -- to decide, but if someone's not up to it, why not just ask Miss Manners? Finally, how do grammarians know "the right way to say a thing"?

As I said, descriptivists are certainly going to take note of what is considered "the right way to say a thing," because that is part of the description of a language. I don't see anything "inhuman" or "lifeless" about that. Take a language like Korean, which is full of proprieties: you speak very differently depending on whether you're addressing someone older or younger than you, or of higher or lower status. These are proprieties; these are conventions; you can call them "rules" if you like. Of course you can't get rid of them, any more than you can get rid of the rules of chess. But it seems to me that any descriptivist worth her salt would know that. Swaim is attacking a straw man; descriptivism is something else.

(Another reason why "rule" is an incorrect -- indeed, improper -- word to use for grammar conventions: language learners tend to make mistakes by following rules, such as the toddler who says "I breaked the window" because adding -ed is the rule for putting a verb in the past tense. Broke, the correct form, doesn't follow the rule; it's a convention.)

If anything is inhuman, though, it's the prescriptivist stance. Swaim brushes aside "those 'inveterate fusspots' who understand just enough English grammar to lord it over their supposed inferiors," but that's just what prescriptivism consists of: throwing tantrums over other people's supposed mistakes, based usually on the tantrum-thrower's personal pet obsessions and peeves, almost always misinformed. And if it isn't the entire point of prescriptivism, it's an invariable fringe benefit to be able to sneer at people who don't meet one's imaginary standards. I wrote not long ago about the exuberant contempt exhibited by prescriptivists for "dolts" who can't spell or punctuate "properly." I've also noticed the frenzied vituperation with which American liberals reacted to George W. Bush's pronunciation of "nuclear" as "nukular." Which reminds me that "propriety" has also been used to justify throwing children, spouses, or employees out on the street for supposed misconduct. You can see this in any nineteenth-century English novel: the idea that while one must show Christian charity to the fallen woman, one must on no account receive her in decent society. (Bertrand Russell once wrote a fine essay on the indecency of "decent" people.) That's why I'm so hard on the prescriptivist swine who spew vitriol against their fellow human beings who follow different language conventions than they do: they and not their targets are behaving inhumanely and immorally.

There's another side to this matter of propriety. Molly Ivins wrote an article, "The Legislative Mangle" (reprinted in her first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? [Random House, 1991] but available online) about the conventions of grammar and pronunciation among career politicians, especially legislators, which strike proscriptivists as subliterate.

In most legislatures, punctilious attention to correct usage is considered elitist. The word government, for example, is normally pronounced ''gummint''; bureaucracy is ''bureaucacy''; fiscal comes out ''physical,'' and one moves not to suspend the rules, but to ''suppend.''
These are not malapropisms or mispronunciations - which is ''mispronounceciations'' in legislative circles. Nor are they the result of ignorance, bad diction, poor enunciation or the regional speech deformity called a Texas accent, or a Maine accent, or a New York accent. Graduates of Harvard do the same things to these words that lawmakers who flunked out of Texas A & I do, no matter where they serve.

Molly Ivins was almost as mean as I am; if I'm meaner, it's because I stand on the shoulders of a giant. For example, she once wrote of a Texas pol, "If his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day"; of another, that he was "smarter than a box of rocks." The thing is, she knew the difference between a glorious malapropism like "This problem is a two-headed sword: it could grow up like a mushing room" and actual evil, like killing people. This is what prescriptivists generally have trouble with. Liberal prescriptivists were much more upset about Dubya's offenses against language conventions than they were about his actual crimes, as shown by their willingness to embrace those crimes when they were committed by a Democratic President. Since he was of their faction, conservative prescriptivists mostly looked the other way with Bush's grammatical and syntactic blunders, trying to argue when cornered that only liberal elitists would notice them in the first place; and they were just fine with his actual crimes.

At the same time, I understand and sympathize with the prescriptivists' visceral reaction to violations of grammatical convention, since I generally share it -- I'm a recovering grammar neurotic myself. I just don't regard it as an excuse for their inhumane stances -- dismissing people who haven't done any real harm to anyone as "dolts", for instance.

More on Hitchings and The Language Wars to come, I expect.

The North-South Position

2012-01-25T21:47:00.003-06:00

Okay, let me see if I can squeeze this one in. (My computer is not yet out of the shop.)

The Onion A.V. Club kindly shared this brief video clip, which may or may not be NSFW:

Perfume Genius ad from nils bernstein on Vimeo.

The clip features Perfume Genius' singer Mike Hadreas and gay porn actor Arpad Mikos. Neither man is nude below the waist; both are shirtless. It seems that both Google and Youtube refused to allow the ad to be posted, because it violated their Adult Image / Video content policy,

which excludes "any ads that contain non-family safe material," adding that "the overall feeling of the video is one of a more adult nature, including promoting mature sexual themes and what appears to be nude content. As such, the video is non-family safe."

More information is available at the AV Club's source, this article at Pitchfork, including a link to the music video from which the images in the ad are drawn, which is on Youtube. The odd thing (coming from me) is that I'm inclined to agree that the clip is of a "more adult nature," including "mature sexual themes," even though in the very brief ad the two men do nothing more (or less) erotic than embrace while gazing intently into each other's eyes. That doesn't seem to me reason for Youtube to reject the ad, especially when the same material is available in the video for "Hood," because "mature sexual themes" are present in most popular entertainment, including the classic Code-era Hollywood films, and because children aren't harmed by them. You know the famous scene in From Here to Eternity, where Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kiss in the sand as the surf flows over them? That shows as much skin as Hadreas and Miklos do, and more passion. It was controversial in its day (1953), but nowadays it's fodder for nostalgia.

Of course, it's different, because Lancaster and Kerr were playing heterosexuals. That is probably the reason Youtube and Google rejected the ad. As some commenters at the AV Club pointed out, if the two men were punching each other (or even simulating more extreme violence) there'd have been no problem. The subject of Ultimate Fighting Championship came up too: "It's hard to tell sometimes. The first time I ever saw UFC on TV, it was two guys that looked like they were 69ing each other, except they had pants on. The announcer said it was the 'North-South' position. Give me a fucking break. We all know what that is . . ."

It all reminds me of Michel Foucault's remark that bigots are less bothered by sodomy (though of course they are bothered by it) than by love and romance between men. I don't mean to overgeneralize, but there's something to what he said, and Youtube's reaction to the Perfume Genius ad supports it.

Blogging Advisory

2012-01-24T23:02:00.000-06:00

I'm having some computer problems, so posting may be light for the next couple of days while I get them fixed. It's frustrating, because I've got plenty to be garrulous about.

Thunder on the Left

2012-01-23T15:38:00.000-06:00

Obama's sycophants continue to depress me. On Friday on Facebook Pearl Cleage linked to a video clip of the President singing a line from Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" at the Apollo:

tell me this isn't the coolest thing you've seen in ages!! i love having a president who wants to end wars and guarantee health care who can also sing a little al green when the moment arises. that's what being on the stage at the apollo will make you do! support the president! register! donate to his campaign! play your al green records and DANCE!

"A president who wants to end wars"? No, a president who wants to extend them, and keeps coming up with more of them. Those are the words of someone for whom partisanship has almost completely wiped out trivial concerns like honesty and ordinary humanity. To show that it was no fluke, Cleage linked on Sunday to a video clip of Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy", adding:

remember when you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing this song? i'm thinking of making it my unofficial anthem for the rest of the republican primaries. newt for president?? REALLY? but.. "don't worry/be happy!" while you make sure everybody in your family of voting age is registered and has a ride to the polls in november!!

The song is repellent anyway, a fitting capstone to the Reagan era from which it came. Even if you "have some trouble," if unemployment remains at 8.5 percent and you just lost your temporary Christmas-season job, if you "have "no place to lay your head," if your landlord threatens to evict you, if you "ain't got no cash," don't frown because your face will freeze like that, and it will "bring everybody down." Besides, "It will soon pass, whatever it is." If you're out of bread, eat cake! No wonder an Obamabot (who is not herself living on the street) appreciates it.

And of course Cleage wasn't the only one who reacted to Obama's performance this way; well, what else have they got to offer? Only that Obama isn't Bush, and surely, comrades, you do not want Bush back?

Alien vs. Predator?

2012-01-22T12:49:00.008-06:00

The image above has begun making the rounds on Facebook, and while I appreciate the point, it's mistaken in some important ways.

Most important, I think, is that Wikileaks has primarily published information on governments, not corporations. Oh, there was a flurry of corporate panic at the end of 2010 when Assange announced that Wikileaks would release a trove of documents on corporate malfeasance, but nothing seems to have come of it. The big story about Wikileaks is and has always been the government secrets -- military, diplomatic -- that it has put on the table. The fact that the person who constructed this image got things so far wrong indicates that he or she doesn't really understand what Wikileaks has done; the intent seems more to bash Facebook and Zuckerberg rather than to praise Assange.

Was the information Wikileaks released "private" in the first place? No, except in the narrow and circular sense of "secret." It was public in the truest sense of the word: it concerned events that were paid for by the public dime, and then concealed from the public by public agencies. Governments do not have a right to privacy, especially when they are engaged in criminal enterprises; nor do government officials in their role as government officials. Whether Barack Obama wears boxers or briefs, for example, is a matter I'm happy to leave private, though it's just the kind of fact that many Americans, and the corporate media, would claim that the public has a right to know. (I suspect that Obama would address the boxers vs. briefs question more readily than questions about dead Afghan or Pakistani children, however.) But what our government is doing with its weapons and its troops and its vast amounts of money is what the public has not only a right but an obligation to know. I'd would include the world, not just Americans, since so much of our crimes are committed on foreign soil.

The original meaning of the word "private" is "secret," and it still often has secrecy as a connotation. Much of what is considered private nowadays is not secret: one's marital status (registered at the courthouse), one's birth date (ditto), the number and names of one's children, and so on. Most people, I think, never consider what they're agreeing to when they join a social network like Facebook, nor despite all the ballyhooed tech-savvy of today's teens do they have any idea how such a system works, or what "privacy" means as a technical term on the Web. But then, neither do most Americans. Even most tech geeks in the 1980s, when I first got online, knew how data packets worked on networks but had little idea what privacy meant on the Net. I shocked the (gay, heterosexually married, closeted) SysOp of a bulletin board system in those days by registering under my own name and posting as an openly gay man; but I knew what I was doing. Other people I knew were outraged to discover that their e-mail wasn't protected by Federal law as their Postal mail was, and that the administrator of a system could read any "private" messages he or she chose to; whatever protection existed was internal to the system.

In the good old days, not so very long ago, anyone could walk into a public library and look through a published street directory, which contained such information as who lived at each address, including children. These directories had many uses, but prominent among them was marketing. A marketer or salesman could check out a neighborhood prior to trying to sell things there. It looks to me as though Facebook and other Internet businesses are just vastly bigger versions of those directories, with all the information organized and searchable by computers. That's just one of the wonders of our Electronic Age, and much of the "privacy" people seem to think they've lost to Facebook's commercial interests was lost long ago; never mind that they themselves freely gave the information to Facebook when they signed up and filled out their profile. Or when they clicked "Like" on this or that corporate product.

Apparently they believe their personal likes and dislikes are "private", hidden in the dark depths of the Intertoobz. But why do they think that all those corporate products are there to be "liked" on Facebook? Nothing is free, and certainly not a vast technological network with hundreds of millions of members. You can't have it both ways, though I suppose in our world you can't even choose the other way. If you want your online "privacy," then you'll need to find another way to pay for the servers and the storage and the programmers; they don't come cheap, especially not on the scale of Facebook. If you want Facebook to be free of charge, then how do you propose to meet its costs? If you want your privacy, then what kind of fool does it take to believe that you can post pictures of you passed out drunk on a global information network and still have any privacy at all?

In another sense of the word, of course, Facebook is private: it's privately owned by Mark Zuckerberg and other shareholders, including its employees. You didn't think it was "public," did you? Like Zuccotti Park? You didn't think it just grew into existence all by itself, like the flowers in the park, available to be picked and/or peed on by anyone who comes along? Truly, the thoughtlessness of many people about the public and the private boggles my mind. But then, it's probably no coincidence that my Facebook friends from Teabag Nation are the ones who always fall for, and pass along, the urban legends about Facebook starting to charge for its services.

A Mad Tebow Party

2012-01-21T18:33:00.009-06:00

I've only made one glancing comment about Tim Tebow on this blog so far, but he apparently continues to fascinate many. One of the main reasons I've paid him so little attention is that, as my readers know, I don't care about sports at all. If the media, including the liberal and left blogosphere, weren't so obsessed with his tendency to drop on one knee and thank Jesus whenever a play goes well, I wouldn't even know who Tebow is. I do care about religion, since it is more likely to impinge on my life, but one point on which I agree with my mother is that People Like That Want Attention, and (unlike her) that you shouldn't give it to them. I see two possibilities with Tebow: either he's just doing it to get attention, in which case he shouldn't get it; or he's perfectly sincere and unselfconscious (which is probably giving him too much credit), in which case his personal religious observance is no one else's business and they should stop rubbernecking.

Of course, pro football, like so much that concerns ordinary Americans, is a hotbed of religious nuttery, and specifically Christian religious nuttery. A blogger at the Washington Post wrote that "some of us are still uncomfortable with the QB's constant flaunting of his Christian faith, beginning virtually every interview thanking Jesus and ending with 'God bless.'" Hell, couldn't that describe most R&B and hiphop albums too? No matter how grossly misogynist the content, the CD acknowledgments always put thanks to God and the rapper's mother at the top of the list. In a different realm, a memory of Red Skelton's ending every TV show with "Thanks, and may God bless" just surfaced in my old brain. That doesn't bother me any more than "Merry Christmas" does.

As numerous writers have pointed out, Tebow wouldn't get all that love from the fans if he were, say, a Muslim. The right-wing writers have a point when they complain that liberals and leftists would be much less likely to jeer at an equally pious Muslim athlete -- but then, those same right-wing writers would not be defending a pious Muslim athlete; they'd be attacking him. So we're stuck with another partisan divide, as when the Right attacks Obama for doing what they loved when Bush did it, and Liberals love Obama for doing what they hated when Bush did it.

So I'm in a bind myself, for the same reason. I don't approve of liberals attacking or mocking Tebow, because it gives him undeserved attention and allows conservative Christians to play the martyr by playing into the paranoid delight in persecution so many of them indulge. (Especially when the "persecution" consists of nothing more than verbal disagreement or mockery.) Besides, I believe that much of the liberal mockery comes from the same source that leads college students to freak out about open-air evangelists on campus: being still flush with the high-school herd mentality, they can't imagine that anyone would do something that would cause them to stand out and be laughed at -- let alone persist in the face of such laughter. (Many liberal attacks on Ron Paul seem to have the same motivation: just making fun of him should send him scurrying to the shadows, but it doesn't work! What's wrong with the guy? By the way, I had a strong sense when I watched the video clip of Alabama fans molesting a passed-out Louisiana fan that the same mindset was at work there: Hey, he's all alone! He's acting weird! There are a lot of us! We can do anything we want to him!)

On the other hand, as I've often noticed before, while it's okay in the liberal mind to make fun of bible-thumping Christians, it's not okay to make fun of Christianity, let alone Jesus. "Real" Christianity as it exists in liberal fantasy is self-evidently a good thing, and Jesus himself was way cool, right? Then a day or so ago the writer Robert Wright explained "Why Liberals Shouldn't Dis Tim Tebow (or Jesus)", closing with the following paragraph:

I should admit to a factor in my thinking that won't carry weight with other people: My parents, who brought me up southern Baptist, also brought me up to respect other people's religious beliefs. The southern Baptist part didn't stick, but the other part continues to make sense to me independent of the tactical considerations above. Explaining why would call for a whole 'nother post.

Wright's parents weren't very good Southern Baptists, then, though I suppose it depends what you mean by "respect[ing] other people's religious beliefs." Maybe he means that publicly attacking other people's beliefs is tacky. Just sticking with Christianity, exhibiting and demonstrating disrespect for other people's religious beliefs is built into the faith, with Jesus' own (public, according to the gospels) attacks on his fellow Jews as the model. Other New Testament writers followed his example, especially with rival Christian teachers. When I point this out, Christians generally argue that it was different because Jesus' targets deserved it: they were hypocrites and legalists and whatnot. But most Christians who attack other Christians justify themselves on the same grounds.

I suspect that Wright is confusing respect with someone's right to hold or express religious beliefs with respect for the beliefs themselves. The former is good manners, and more or less an obligation in a pluralist society that protects religious freedom; the latter is not an obligation, though good manners should discourage us from mocking others' beliefs gratuitously, lest they attack ours. Conservative Christians might bear that in mind themselves, but much of their culture consists of denunciations of other Christians' beliefs. (I read a fair amount of fundamentalist polemics against liberal Christians -- or "apostate" Christians, as they often called them -- in the 1980s and 90s, so I know whereof I speak.) They aren't really interested in getting along with others; triumphalism is more their style: a total victory over the ungodly, that is, just about everybody but them. But the rest of us shouldn't sink to their level, if only because pluralists should be concerned in how to get along with others, and should know that there's no such thing as total victory over your opponents in the real world. In so far as liberals are indulging in triumphalist fantasies themselves, they're not as different from fundamentalists as they like to believe.

Evolution Helps Those Who Help Themselves

2012-01-21T17:17:00.006-06:00

One of my obnoxious friends on Facebook passed along the above motto today. My comment: "That's exactly what I'm worried about." That is, I'm worried that there's Someone up there stirring up the earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions; inventing new and more lethal plagues; and guiding the predator drones to their young targets, and that's "how it's meant to be."

This is, as I've said before, a matter of temperament. I would prefer that no one and nothing is in charge of the universe, rather than that Someone is charge, doing all these things. The more optimistic possibility is that They are sitting up there, watching everything that happens, and doing nothing; the more pessimistic option is that They are actively involved. But either way, as Terry Pratchett put it while in his cups, we are in the hands of a madman, and being an atheist is no help at all. If a fly could say "I don't believe in you!" to the kid pulling its wings off, what difference would it make?

But then, neither is being a religious believer, whether a fundamentalist Christian, a Wiccan, a Roman Catholic, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist, or a processor of New Age / therapeutic sludge. It may well be that the Supreme Being, whatever it is, has a reason for letting you die slowly and in agony of cancer, diabetes, or emphysema, that your helpless writhing is "how it's meant to be." So was the Final Solution. As a human being and a moral agent, however, I don't see any reason why I'm bound to assent to it, or why I should trust people who do.

Stating the Obvious

2012-01-20T23:07:00.004-06:00

A midnight quickie for you.

I don't remember where this online exchange took place, but it seems worth mentioning here. I was surfing the Web earlier today, and in comments somewhere I noticed that someone had written that opinions are like assholes -- everyone has one, and they all stink.

"Well," I replied, "that's your opinion."

Point Counterpoint

2012-01-20T07:22:00.006-06:00

In an earlier post I linked to this article on Dan Savage's ongoing campaign against Rick Santorum, a worthy target if ever there was one. In case you didn't click through, here's the relevant passage, asterisks and all:

Savage and Santorum's spat originates in 2003. Santorum had compared gay sex to bestiality and incest and in response, Savage set out to Google-bomb and create a new meaning for "Santorum" (just try it to see results). But on the heels of Santorum signing the "Marriage Pledge," Savage appeared (NSFW-unless you have earphones and can watch YouTube at work) on Bill Maher's Real Time on July 15. Savage, along with the panel, discussed the stable of potential Republican nominees. "I sometimes think about f****** the s*** out of Rick Santorum," he said. "He needs it...Let's bone that Santorum good. I'd be up for whipping up Santorum in that Santorum." That night he issued an apology, but it was for a comment he made under his breath, not an apology to Santorum.

Savage's remarks didn't offend me ("Oh, Dan, how can you say such awful things?"): they pissed me off. I can sympathize with him, of course: bigotry of any kind infuriates me too. But I'm not venting on national television. Further, Savage these days is letting his rage render him totally irrational, as I've pointed out before. I'm not pissed off because Savage is "hurting the cause", as some might argue. I'm pissed off because he's indulging in homophobic abuse that no one should be allowed to get away with, using sex as a metaphor for debasement and humiliation. He's tapping into the same reservoir of male violence that drives queerbashers and rapists. Me, I don't think that Rick Santorum "needs" to be fucked, brutally or tenderly. I wouldn't touch him -- or Dan Savage, for that matter -- with a ten-foot pole.

On the other hand, I think that Google-bombing Santorum was a brilliant, effective, and entirely justified move. Santorum thinks it's okay to compare homosexuality to pedophilia (risky territory for a Roman Catholic these days) or bestiality, which isn't moral argument but simply a cheap smear. If you need evidence that he's stupid as well as evil, he continues to use the same vacuous and dishonest comparisons, even though they aren't necessary to an anti-gay campaign. Maybe he feels that, after having been compared to the frothy mix of semen and fecal matter that sometimes accompanies anal sex, he has nothing to lose. Except the race for the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, I guess. And on the third hand, Savage should realize by now that humiliation isn't the most effective way to stop an opponent; after all, Frothy still did a lot better this time around, even if he finally was defeated by equally bigoted opponents. That indicates that the Google-bomb didn't hurt Santorum where it mattered, among his reactionary Christian-homophobe constituency. I doubt we've seen the last of him. ("No," to quote Firesign Theater, "but the first of you turns my stomach!")

There are more than two sides here, though AtlanticWire blogger Alexander Abad-Santos doesn't stand above the fray as he evidently believes he does, in that lofty, Olympian corporate-media journalistic way. Did you notice the word "spat" in the paragraph I quoted earlier? Well, he goes on to make sure you know he meant it.

What They Say They're Fighting About: Gay rights. This is how Savage and Santorum got into this spat in the first place. Santorum's stated that his ideal view of America doesn't include gay rights like marriage equality and has, in the past, equated gay sex with bestiality and incest. Conversely, Savage, who is openly gay, is an advocate for gay rights and created the "It Gets Better" campaign--a project that aims to combat the effects of bullying on gay teens.
What They're Really Fighting About: They're fighting about fighting at this point. It's worth pointing out, too, that Savage benefits from his stance and criticisms of Santorum, hence his recent appearances on Maher and FOD. Santorum, having only raised $582,348 in second-quarter reports is trying to monetize Savage's attacks.

"What They Say They're Fighting About" -- Ooooh, snap! It's not as if the status and condition of non-heterosexuals in American society isn't still a contested issue, with a considerable body count, pretty much all of it on one side. It's not as if sex between men or sex between women hadn't been a felony in many American states until 2003 -- and despite having been overturned by the United States Supreme Court, many of those laws are still on the books, and being used to harass queers. Meanwhile, as far as I know, no antigay bigot has done jail time simply for expressing bigoted views (as opposed to beating up or killing somebody). "Gay rights" is really the least of it. It's about deeply rooted cultural attitudes, much like racism and sexism. To skate over that hard reality with the airy word "spat" is despicable.

It might not be entirely inaccurate to say that Savage and Santorum are now merely "fighting about fighting," because there is a tendency for people locked in conflict to forget what divides them as they focus on tactics and vengeance. But given what gay people, and especially gay youth, are facing now -- given lethal antigay violence, given the bullying of gay kids that inspired Savage's "It Gets Better" in the first place, given the neglect with which nominally responsible adults have responded to this violence -- there's a distinct flavor of "Let Them Eat Cake" in Abad-Santos' dismissal of the Savage-Santorum "spat" as a merely personal quarrel. (And by "Them" I mean gay people.) I don't doubt that Santorum sincerely believes in the bigoted swill he spews at, apparently, every opportunity. That just shows how little sincerity is worth. Nor do I doubt that Savage's excesses spring from the helpless fury he feels every time the suicide of another young queer is reported in the news. Or when bigoted schoolmates celebrate such suicides. Rage is a perfectly appropriate reaction to these stories. Dismissing them, as Abad-Santos does, is not.

What is going on between Savage and Santorum can't be reduced to pettiness or spite. If they both disappeared tomorrow -- whether they were carried up to Heaven by angels, or cast into Hell to be entertained by demons -- the real issue would still remain, and even if Abad-Santos were right (though I don't think he is) about what is driving Santorum and Savage now, he'd be every bit as guilty as they are for reducing the conflict to personalities.

He That Is Married Cares for the Things of the World

2012-01-19T22:17:00.009-06:00

I guess we all need demonic Others to give us an excuse to run around screaming and waving our hands limply at the wrists. Rick Santorum has Homosexuals. We Homosexuals have Rick Santorum. I clicked through from a post describing to a confrontation between a transgender activist and Santorum in South Carolina:

Kneena Raheja, 20, yelled, "Mr. Santorum, you have spilled queer blood!" as the GOP presidential hopeful finished speaking, according to BuzzFeed. It was a tough crowd; just one man reportedly snickered.

Raheja, who was born a boy, later told Buzzfeed that she thinks "people like Rick Santorum are actively violent towards the queer population."

You know, I really hate it when my people (and they are my people, drunk or sober) trivialize our very real problems with overwrought, inflationary rhetoric. "Spilled queer blood" is, I guess, normal if not acceptable hyperbole: the phrase "blood on his hands" is a common metaphor, as is "bloodbath," and hardly anybody takes it literally. But "actively violent" is not, except in the La-la Land where "violence" covers everything from turning down the corners of your mouth in distaste to spraying a crowd with automatic weapons fire. (Cf. "rape," which "continues to evolve from a word meaning 'violent, forced sexual intercourse' to its more modern definition as 'something kind of upsetting that happens to famous people.'") Santorum may be inciting other bigots to violence, though like any person in his position he'd surely disavow any such intention and condemn anyone who physically attacks homosexuals in his name. But "actively violent" can't, as far as I can tell, mean anything but that Santorum picks up the baseball bat himself; and if Raheja has evidence of that, the police need to have it and charges need to be filed.

Anyway, the article alluded to Santorum comparing gay marriage to polygamy in New Hampshire, so I clicked through to that story:

When his answers failed to persuade the crowd, he was forced to resort to Socratic method -- a tactic that frustrated some in the audience and led to shouts that he was avoiding the questions.
"If it makes three people happy to get married, based on what you just said, what makes that wrong and what you said right?" Santorum asked a young woman grilling him on marriage equality, comparing same-sex marriage to polygamy.

When she responded that his question was "irrelevant," Santorum replied, "You know, it's important, if we're going to have a discussion based on rational, reasoned thought, that we employ reason." There were audible groans from the audience.

I'm not sure that that was really "Socratic method," but two things should be noticed about this exchange. One is that Santorum's basic analogy is sound: if same-sex marriage should be allowed because it will make the partners happy, then it's legitimate to apply the same standard to other models. The "young woman grilling him on marriage equality" was wrong when she claimed that the question was irrelevant; if anyone was dodging the issue, it was she. And isn't it inspiring that the audience groaned when Santorum invoked reason?

The other is that they were both wrong, because polygamy is a traditional, biblical value. Instead of whining that he was changing the subject, his interlocutor should have asked him why he opposes polygamy -- if it was good enough for Moses and Solomon, why isn't it good enough for us today? (Jesus and Paul, on the other hand, are models for total sexual abstinence if not for becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of Heaven. Santorum, with his seven children, is no follower of theirs.) Putting same-sex marriage on the same level with plural marriage should have backfired: was he saying that, like polygamy, same-sex marriage was acceptable under the Old Covenant even if it isn't today? Wasn't he equating Adam and Steve with the patriarchs and their numerous wives and concubines? (If he brings up incest, remind him of Abraham and Sarah.) Is he aware that Augustine wrote that Christians didn't practice polygamy merely to conform with Roman law and custom? If so, he's a radical moral relativist. If not, he's ignorant. Either way, he painted himself into a corner.

Instead, the advocate for marriage equality revealed that she's just as narrow as Santorum. Like him, she hasn't thought much about the meaning or history of marriage and is just parroting slogans. It isn't like I needed to be reminded how little there is to choose between Santorum and his cultured despisers.

Penetrating Rhetoric

2012-01-19T15:14:00.013-06:00

Some readers may think I harp too much on this, but I don't think so. I think it's important to point out how often it turns up in casual everyday use, as a substitute for thought where thought is what's called for.

Glenn Greenwald has a good post today on a smear campaign being waged by some adherents of the Israel lobby against some critics of Israel, labeling them anti-Semitic. He provides some damning quotations, which shows these petty journalistic thugs declaring that it's anti-Semitic to express any doubts about the reality of Iran's (non-existent) nuclear program. Since the campaign's targets are some commentators at two organizations with strong links to the Democratic Party, it's a safe bet that the intent is to put more pressure on the Obama administration to lie about Iran and support Israeli terrorism against Iran, if not upgrade US terrorism. And that's ironic when you consider Obama's longstanding and uncritical support for Israel, and his equally longstanding campaign against Iran.

But what I'm writing about now is the very first comment on Greenwald's article, by someone with the screenname "charleythecat." Here's the comment in its entirety:

Bottom line: Anyone who does not (rhetorically) bend-over and take it up the ass for Israeli interests is an anti-Semite.

I might not have bothered to point it out if this line had occurred in the context of an extended, reasoned discussion; but as I said, that is all that charleythecat had to say on the subject. He evidently thought he could forestall criticism with "rhetorically," but since so many people use "literally" to mean "figuratively," it's not the most effective defense. The "rhetorical" figure itself comes from homophobic and misogynist discourse anyway, which sees literal (by which I mean literal, not figurative) penetration as debasing, humiliating, and polluting, so the rhetorical use depends on the literal one.

(As I've noticed before, butts and buttsex play a very large role in boy culture and its games of one-upmanship. Even I couldn't resist asking charleythecat if "Bottom line" was meant to be part of the joke. Many words and idioms in English, to say nothing of other languages, can be used to allude to, imply, and joke about buttsex.)

Notice too that while charleythecat suggests coercion, it's not very strong coercion: take it up the ass, or you'll be called an anti-Semite! Your money, or be called an anti-Semite! Give me liberty, or give me your ass! Anyone who can't stand up to name-calling probably deserves to be debased. Of course, what is at stake in the smear campaign Greenwald wrote about is more important than mere verbal debasement: one target writer has already left the Center for American Progress (CAP) for another job, and destroying the target organizations by cutting off their funding and access would no doubt please the perpetrators, if it made criticism of Israel even more difficult to publish than it already is.

The last time I wrote about this subject, you may recall, it involved a commenter at alicublog who rewrote the gospel parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus to put the poor suffering Lazarus in hell, where he was "fucked by demons in every orifice." The commenter tried to defend himself by insisting that he was writing about "demon-nostril-rape", not anal sex, a half-hearted defense belied by the fact that he hadn't used the word "rape" and had written of "every orifice," not just the nostrils. (He may also have responded derisively as an assertion of straight-male privilege.) His defense inadvertently showed that for him, "fuck" means "rape," underscoring the way so many straight men have trouble distinguishing between the two.

The distinction doesn't really matter, though, because the power and meaning of rape is that it humiliates, debases and pollutes the victim by virtue of penetrating him or her; consent is irrelevant, though forcing the pollution on another elevates the rapist even higher in his own mind. Consent is also irrelevant because a woman who consents to be penetrated outside of marriage (that is, by anyone but the male who owns her), is still polluted, a whore and a slut. See again the passages, in the biblical book of Ezekiel, in which Yahweh denounces Jerusalem as a "harlot," a loose woman who welcomes and enjoys the embrace of other gods / nations -- "whore" in the biblical context is also "rhetorical," meaning any polluted woman, not just a woman who sells sexual service. As punishment, Yahweh (who's insecure about his, um, manhood) threatens to uncover Jerusalem's nakedness in front of all her lovers, another scenario of sexual debasement and humiliation. The entire chapter of Ezekiel 23 is pornographic, in the strict etymological sense.

And, of course, a man who freely and willingly consents to be penetrated is a faggot. Reversed, calling a man a faggot regardless of his sexual practices is meant to debase him by implying that he's so low, such a "fucking weak ass ... loos[er]", that he's no different from men who are literally penetrated and therefore polluted.

It's true, though unimportant, that woman and gay men also speak of penetration as degrading. I presume that the women who do so enjoy imagining themselves as participating in masculine power and authority. Some gay men do so because they personally enjoy being degraded, or enjoy consensual sexual scenarios involving degradation. Or nonconsensual ones. (Which doesn't mean that the false equivalence the writer of that article posits between Savage and Santorum isn't repulsively dishonest.) Others, because they want to identify with homophobic straight men. That's not, presumably, what charleythecat had in mind (though who knows?). I've also suggested before that many gay men fall back on the claim that they were born gay because they feel bad about being gay, about being penetrated, and want to exculpate themselves by blaming it on their genes. That's what's known as internalized homophobia, and it's sad, but it won't be healed by perpetuating the belief that sex inherently involves the humiliation of one partner by the other, and using that belief to power rhetoric perpetuates it.

I might not digress too far if I mention Gandhi's 1929 letter to W. E. B. DuBois, in which he wrote: "Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is no dishonour in being slaves. There is dishonour in being slave-owners." (The letter is available online, but I first read the quotation in Vijay Prahad's The Karma of Brown Folk [Minnesota, 2000], page 176.) Analogously, there's no dishonor in being penetrated, whether willingly or unwillingly. (It's one of the core indictments of patriarchy that it casts the victim of rape -- female or male -- as polluted, and better off dead.) The dishonor lies in using sex, whether literal or rhetorical, to humiliate others.

Still, that's the key: the first thing that popped into charleythecat's head when he considered a smear campaign against critics of Israel was a fag joke. And he boiled down Greenwald's complex argument to nothing more than a claim that Israel is trying to make America its bitch. While I don't doubt that boy-dominance games get played in the mostly-male corridors of power, there really is more involved than that.

The Playboy of the Eastern World

2012-01-18T16:11:00.005-06:00

Salon passed along a remarkably empty article on North Korea from the GlobalPost, "an awarding-winning international news site that focuses on original reporting." Donald Kirk's "reporting" in "The Unlikely Threat to North Korea" is original mainly in the sense of being creative, spinning wordage out of nothing. "Long dismissed as a playboy, Kim Jong Il's eldest son has become an outspoken and dangerous critic of the regime," promises the subhead, but the article doesn't deliver.

Of course that's typical of American reporting on official enemies. Kim Jong Il was fat, ugly, and crazy, with the biggest porn collection this side of the Vatican -- or so we in the West were constantly told, with propaganda feeds from the South Korean CIA. In the case of Kim Jong Nam, the subject of Kirk's article,

The wires are abuzz with news of a soon-to-be-released book based on emails and interviews between Kim Jong Nam and a Japanese journalist Yoji Gomi over a seven year period. In the book, which is called “My father Kim Jong Il and Me,” Jong Nam reportedly said that North Korea is bound for collapse and called his half-brother, Kim Jong Un, a figurehead.

What “a joke to the outside world,” Jong Nam is purported to have said of the ascent of Jong Un, whom he admitted he has never actually met. More seriously, Jong Nam predicted, “The Kim Jong Un regime will not last long” and “without reform … the regime will collapse.”

So, let's see: a book that hasn't been published yet (and the author of the link in that quotation hasn't read it either, though she does scratch Kirk on the back: she says he "called Kim Jong Nam 'an unguided missile' whose 'uncensored, unauthorized comments provide relief from the relentless flow of propaganda.'" Radical!); an estranged son who's been speaking truth to power on his Facebook page, since 2001 when he

fell out with his father following an incident at Tokyo's Narita airport, where he was nailed for trying to get through on a fake Dominican passport. Jong Nam fled to Macau and has been living it up ever since.

If you can't trust someone like that, who can you trust? For Donald Kirk, he inspires absolute confidence:

Into this morass of ignorance steps Kim Jong Nam, firing off verbal salvos that are wildly unpredictable, not to mention improbable. Isn’t he risking his neck with casually dubious comments to journalists who find him from time to time near his home in the gambling enclave of Macau?
Could it be that one day we’ll wake up to find that Jong Nam has been mysteriously snuffed out like a few others who’ve dared to spill the regime’s “secrets” after fleeing for sanctuary elsewhere?

Sounds like just the kind of guide the US needs into the murky morass of North Korea. Someone like Ahmed Chalabi, who never steered us wrong about Iraq. Maybe the Pentagon should give Kim Jong Nam a stipend too, if they're not already doing it. Who's supporting him in "the gambling enclave of Macau?" Kirk says he "has the Chinese on his side," though he's vague about what that means, as he is about everything else in his article.

This is not a recommendation of Kim Jong Un, who is young and inexperienced to be running a country, especially one like North Korea. Kim Jong Nam's prediction that the Northern regime will collapse is not absurd; but then, Western analysts have been predicting the same thing for decades, which may be why they talk now about "stability" instead; you can only go on being a false prophet for so long. Kirk prattles about the "threat" Kim Jong Nam somehow poses to Pyongyang, but doesn't back that up with any substance. Does Kim have viable supporters back home who'd want him to take his half-brother's place? Does he have a way to get past North Korea's state-run media to stir a spirit of rebellion among the masses? Does he have a magical ring that has the power to rule all others, if he can only find his way into the depths of Mordor? Kirk doesn't say. Nor does he say anything to back his claim that "With his views now on the record, [Kim]’s emerged as a font of wisdom and insight into his late father’s fiefdom."

A collapse of the Pyongyang regime would be a human disaster, but there are always scum who fantasize about such things. American frothers were cheated by Gorbachev and fate of the bloodbath they'd dreamed of since 1917 for the Soviet Union, and they preferred to ignore the many deaths from disease and hunger that resulted from the Chicago boys' restructuring interventions in the 90s. The US under George W. Bush blocked attempts at conciliation initiated by the South, especially Kim Dae Jung's Sunshine Policy, and backed hardliners like Lee Myung Bak instead. Funny; you'd think that it should be up to the Koreans to decide such things, wouldn't you? And it's also funny to see Kim Dae Jung denounced for allegedly giving money to Kim Jong Il when the US gives palette-loads of cash to US collaborators like Hamid Karzai.

Yep, Kim Jong Nam sounds like just kind of friend the US has been looking for. Or at least the kind that right-wing ideologues like Donald Kirk want us to look for.

The Mouth of Bourbon Street

2012-01-17T15:01:00.012-06:00

In a lighter vein, my Tabloid Friend on Facebook linked to a doozy of a story today, with video. The title says it all, or nearly: "NSFW: An Alabama Fan Teabagged a Passed-Out LSU Fan at the Bourbon Street Krystal." The video doesn't seem to be embeddable, but if you really want to see it it's still on the Deadspin page.

It's a distinctly creepy video. There is no indication of who took the video, though we see his hands for a few seconds at one point. The accompanying article calls Krystal at the mouth of Bourbon Street a "restaurant," but it probably includes a sports bar since the video shows a bunch of drunken Alabama fans (as you can tell by their attire) milling around a single passed-out LSU fan. The Alabama fans are a mix of male and female, mostly white but including at least one African-American woman. They look middle- to upper-class, which fits since they were able travel to an away game and then party at a restaurant/bar afterwards.

The Alabama fans are fascinated by Mr. LSU. They begin stacking empty juice or food contains on his shoulders. One guy starts to unzip his pants, but changes his mind. One woman stands right behind Mr. LSU and starts to raise her top, then changes her mind. A guy with a goatee is especially intrigued by him, holds his middle finger in front of his unconscious face, and finally opens the zipper of his pants with great care to bring out his testicles (not his penis, as far as I could tell). He moves around to Mr. LSU's side and rubs his scrotal sac on LSU's shoulder for a few seconds, then moves away, though he leaves his pants open for a while longer. Finally a young black restaurant worker (cap, apron, latex gloves) remonstrates mildly with the Bama fans, who act as though they're going to disperse or at least move elsewhere, and the video ends a few moments later.

There are some strange things about the video. One is that the camera evidently wasn't hidden: whether it was made with a phone or a dedicated camera, the equipment seems to have been in plain sight. This doesn't seem to have made the Alabama fans any more circumspect. It makes me wonder how much coordination was involved here. Was it "Hey, Bob, you teabag this drunk and I'll get video, we'll put it on YouTube"? If so, how drunk to you have to be for that to sound like a good idea, especially to the guy who's going to take his balls out in public?

Whatever. I did some looking for definitions, and I think I can safely say that what happened in this video wasn't "teabagging," which seems to involve at least getting your scrotum in contact with the subject's face, and preferably into his or her mouth. The guy in this video didn't even get near Mr. LSU's face, just sorta dry-humped his fully clothed shoulder. One female commenter on Tabloid Friend's status cried that the video depicted "oral rape." Huh-uh; not even close. But if you ever wondered how a lynch mob starts, that's one way: someone hysterically manufactures a sexually-charged accusation. In this case, luckily, there was no way to run with it. I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that what happens in this video could be classified as sexual assault or sexual battery, if anyone wanted to bring charges. Amazingly (to me, anyway), some geek claimed on Twitter and elsewhere to be the guy with ball sack, though it shouldn't be necessary to resort to social media for the police to find him if they wanted to: he performed on video in a brightly lit room, for goodness' sake.

But the other thing I learned from perusing the web was that teabagging is not only a trope in porn videos, it's a form of hazing and play among younger, supposedly straight guys, their way of bonding around a friend who's either asleep or passed out drunk. It fits with the straight male belief that the male genitals are an instrument of humiliation and abasement for anyone who comes in contact with them: if I brush your face with my ball sack, I have turned you into a fag. I don't think you have to be a Freudian to suspect that this is most exciting to someone who secretly wants to fool around with another man but doesn't want to think of himself as queer. Just as a matter of policy, every male who plays this game should be labeled a fag forever after. But I think the game is more about power relations, dominance and abasement, than it is about eroticism -- which is another reason to give a hard time to those who play it.

The other game being played in this video, of course, is sports rivalry. The passed-out LSU fan symbolizes LSU itself to the drunken Alabama fans who play with his unconscious body. (In the same way that a head of state, whether president or monarch, is the nation, and a blow struck against him is a blow against the nation. Toppling a statue of a hated leader has the same meaning, even when it's a staged media event. It's poppet magic.) Flipping him the bird shows it most openly, even or especially because he can't see it: We beat you! We made a faggot out of you! Suck on this! Both men and women get into the game here. Another clue: the Deadspin writer reports the "some people are claiming the victim in this is now dead, making the 'This guy's life is over' line uttered in the video creepy. (We're trying to get in touch with New Orleans police. We'll update if we hear from them.)" So far no update, even two days later, so I figure this claim can be laid to rest. "This guy's life is over" meant, first, that LSU is toast, it has been made a fag by its loss to Alabama; and second, maybe, that the victim's life is over because he was abased on video for the whole world to see. I don't know: his face isn't really visible, and it would be a lot harder to identify him from the clip than Mr. Goatee, whose life really should be over. At the very least, he shouldn't be able to go to work or walk down the street without being mocked and taunted.

I found a couple of articles online about teabagging as a "new" form of bullying in Our Schools, for example: "something apparently inspired by the Halo video game series, in which players can perform a posturing move over a defeated enemy." Then there were comments like this one on another post:

ya those kids went overboard but really that kid is such a P***y for letting his face get balls rubbed on it as weel as a banana shoved in his ass. i mean like quaker says boys will be boys, they went over the line here and should be dealt with properly. this kid if he is to much aof a bithc to defend himself with his fists should take a bat to these guys.

If "boys will be boys", then why should it "dealt with properly"? ("Boys will be boys" is used to defend just about everything violent or criminal that boys like to do, up to and including gang rape and broken bones.)

The sexual abasement of boys by other boys in dominance games is as old as the word "faggot" and its equivalents. In my day "pantsing" -- ganging up on a boy and pulling down his pants to humiliate him -- was popular. (I must track down an account I once read of pantsing as a guy pastime in 19th century Mexican fiction.) Much of its endurance depends on its not being celebrated on the Intertoobz: it's supposed to be one of those things that happens out of sight of adults, and of course only a whining "bithc" would tattle over some tiny thing like having a banana shoved into his butt. Again, this kind of thing might properly be dealt with by publicly labeling the perpetrators as gaywads. Use homophobia to catch a homophobe.

Still, what got me started here was the overreaction: this event was "teabagging" only by courtesy, as it were (though probably also by intention: if Mr. Goatee could have gotten his balls in Mr. LSU's face, he no doubt would have, but it turned out to be too awkward). And "oral rape"? Tabloid Friend and his commenters love to jerk off over other people's sexual peccadilloes; it's the American way.

War Is Peace

2012-01-16T21:30:00.008-06:00

Today was Martin Luther King Jr. day, and at least here in Bloomington, King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 4, 1967 got its fair share of attention. The community radio station broadcast the entire speech on Alternative Radio this morning, and Bring It On, the African-American affairs program, referred to it. I've often quoted the part where King referred to the United States as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," but I hadn't listened to or read the entire speech before, and I'm glad I finally did.

King presented an accurate account of US involvement in Vietnam, which I suspect would still be news to most Americans. For example:

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

But, as he said, King was just as concerned with American troops as with the Vietnamese:

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

He also addressed this earlier in the speech, in words that are still painfully relevant today.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

I don't know what King would say about our current President and our present wars if he were alive today. Some people online were sure he would be excoriating President Obama; I'm not so sure of that. King privately hated President Kennedy, and he wasn't terribly fond of President Johnson either; but publicly he was diplomatic. I don't know what he'd think of Obama, or what balance he'd find between satisfaction at the US electing a black President on the one hand, and disapproval of Obama's doing exactly what King had spoken against in 1967. (I admit, I'm sure that he would disapprove.)

What I do know is Obama's contempt for King. (Compare his praise of Ronald Reagan.) In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he said:

As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their [King and Gandhi’s] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.

And you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Funny thing, though: I don't see King condemning defensive violence in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, though he didn't exactly endorse it either. He recognized that the US was the aggressor, and that the Vietnamese were defending themselves against it. He hoped for a negotiated settlement, but he recognized that the Vietnamese had good reason to distrust the US, and that the US was the principal obstacle to peace in Vietnam.

The real trouble with Obama's remarks here is that his wars are not defending the US: they are wars of aggression. Nor do they protect us: they make the world less safe, giving people some very good reasons to want to attack us. His succeeding account of post-WWII American foreign policy is equally dishonest, though this line is entertaining: "To begin with, I believe that all nations -- strong and weak alike -- must adhere to standards that govern the use of force." Except for the United States, of course. If our wars were really "self-defense," I'd expect King to regard them as compassionately as he regarded the resistance of the Vietnamese.

In his Nobel speech Obama continued:

For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

There's more in the speech along the same lines. (Whatever It Is I'm Against It dissected it mercilessly.) So: could a non-violent movement halt American violence around the world? I don't know; nonviolent resistance in Iraq did pressure Bush into permitting elections there, but American forces are still there, though they've mostly been replaced with mercenaries. Obama's lack of awareness that his justification for military violence also justifies defensive violence against his regime is a sign of how out of touch with reality he had already become within a year in office, and he hasn't gotten any better since then.

Roy Edroso has a post at alicublog about rightbloggers who observe MLK Day (a day on ... not a day off!) by trying to prove that King was really a conservative and therefore The Blacks should vote Republican. Judging from his examples, their heart really isn't it anymore. A commenter, Mr. Wonderful, observed that there's "something so sad and desperate about their endless efforts to 'prove' that X--a show, a star, a song, a movie, a new entree at Outback, a floor wax, a new chewing gum-- 'is really conservative.'" True dat, but is it any sadder than liberals' conviction that King was a liberal, or that Barack Obama is a progressive?

You Say Tomato, I Say Eclectic

2012-01-15T21:30:00.006-06:00

It seems that even retirement doesn't give me enough extra time: I haven't done much writing the past couple of days because I've been reading hard, trying to get through some books that I've had sitting around for too long. And I succeeded, but didn't do much else.

One of the books I finished this weekend was The Libertine's Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China (Chicago, 2011) by Giovanni Vitiello. It's a survey of literary portrayals of male homosexuality in China, starting with the usual ancient tales (the Cut Sleeve, the Shared Peach) but concentrating on novels from the 1600s on. In particular Vitiello draws on pornographic novels that had been suppressed or forgotten in the mid-20th have century but have been reprinted in the last fifteen years. There are changes over time in the way sexual relationships between men are depicted, especially in the gradual emergence of a relative egalitarianism: in the earlier works, there's a sharp divide in status between the older, richer man (usually a scholar) and the younger, poorer, boy (an actor, servant, or other person of "vile" status), but the gap gradually narrows though it never entirely disappears. The book is fascinating, and I'm going to have to make time to read some of the works it describes -- those that have been translated into English, anyway.

Vitiello also deals adroitly with conceptual problems (such as the appropriateness of using the word "homosexual" in a classical Chinese context), and I especially liked this discussion (59-60):

“Syncretism” is a problematic word. Not by chance, Judith Berling needed to justify her use of it before dealing with Lin Zhao’en. In Western intellectual discourse, “syncretism” has often carried a derogative connotation; it is associated with decadence and corruption and accused of being irrational, random rather than systematic. Berling, in its defense, stressed the aspect of selectivity involved in the process of syncretic reconciliation, thus distinguishing syncretism from a more random eclecticism. More recently, Timothy Brook has readdressed the issue of the relation between syncretism and eclecticism, offering an alternative evaluation. He warns us against using “syncretism” to describe the notion of sanjiao guiyi, and prefers to speak of a late Ming (preeminently Confucian) eclecticism: an ecumenical and inclusivistic orientation, though not one requiring blending or reconciliation. The potential for blending, Brook suggests, was greater at the level of popular worship and within sectarian movements.

... In a more positive light, we can view syncretism as a constructive counterpart of that erosion (if not erasure) of boundaries that many scholars have recognized as a mark of Ming culture. The special density of processes of negotiation and translation featured by late Ming culture corresponds to a blurring of boundaries at a variety of levels – of philosophical and religious boundaries, no doubt, but also of social (most notably, between literati and merchants) and literary boundaries, both in terms of language and of genre (classical and vernacular/elite and popular literature). We may apply this perspective even to gender and thus help explain the currency in the late Ming of an “androgynous ideal” as well as of hybrid models of masculinity.

This touches on a common problem in the academic writing I read, which is one reason I think everybody who goes to graduate school in the humanities should read, or at least refer to Raymond Williams's Keywords: very often scholars are dogmatic but also uninformed about the meanings of the abstract words they're using. In this case, some use "eclecticism" to mean what others mean by "syncretism," and the distinction appears to be more of a value judgment than an actual description. Either electicism or syncretism can be "random," depending on the scholar.

Boundaries are always somewhat arbitrary, especially between ideas and concepts but also between social divisions, and there's no reason to believe that there was an original pure maleness and femaleness, for example. The overlap between the traits and abilities that men and women actually exhibit is much greater than the differences, and gender norms are meant to try to ignore that overlap. In homosexuality, the attempt to differentiate between the partners also requires a great deal of mental work: in the penetrated / penetrator dichotomy, for example, "when two persons with the same male sexual organs are naked, the construction of one of the partners as a not-homosexual man and of the other one as a not-male person is difficult to upkeep" (Annick Prieur, Mema's House, Mexico City [Chicago, 1998], page 274). It's also difficult to ensure that changes in the system of difference will be "rational" rather than "random," since the changes always appear irrational and threatening to those who are invested in maintaining the status quo. Most likely the changes are declared rational only after they've become established.

There's more interesting stuff in The Libertine's Friend, especially touching on the rise of "modern" homosexuality in China. I'll try to write more about it soon.

What Is Reality?

2012-01-13T00:08:00.003-06:00

This video is making the rounds, and I liked watching it too ... until the very end.

A "Real Book" is not an object made of paper, ink, and cardboard. I love those objects, and I have thousands of them, okay? I read them, too, promiscuously. I don't own an e-book reader, and don't know when or if I will. (I've tried reading books on my laptop, and it doesn't work well for me.)

A book is this mystical thing that is bigger on the inside than on the outside: it can be stored on paper, parchment, or electrons; read aloud and stored on audio media; memorized (admittedly this is rare) and stored in a human being's head. An e-book on a Kindle, Nook, or other reading device is a real book, because all books are virtual. (The same is true of music: a written score isn't the music, any more than an analog or digital recording is.)

As long as people are reading, in whatever format or medium, I'll be happy. I don't see any reason to believe they'll stop soon, contrary to the alarmists and the triumphalists. Reading has survived the movies and television, and I think the Internet has increased the reading (and writing) most users do.

I love brick-and-mortar bookstores, but I also know that they are a relatively recent phenomenon historically. I'd like them to stick around for a long time, but even if they do, they're going to change. I'm don't think change is always good, but it always happens, for better or worse. Reading, however, will be with us in one form or another for a good long time.

Can They Do That?

2012-01-12T11:03:00.005-06:00

Pearl Cleage, who's a good novelist but a straight-up Obamabot, posted this on Facebook today:

... i LOVE michelle obama. i'm sorry she's upset about the new book "the obamas" where the author speculates on what the first lady might be thinking and feeling about her husband, her marriage, etc. but don't you worry, michelle! we've got your back ... AND we're registered to vote for your husband!

Two things occurred to me: How do you register to vote for a specific candidate? Oh, I know she didn't mean that; she just meant that "we" (whaddaya mean "we", Kimo Sabe?) are registered to vote, and "we" are gonna vote for Obama in November. But even more: how does Cleage know that Michelle wants to spend four more years in the White House? I wouldn't blame her a bit if she didn't. Talk about "speculat[ing] about what the first lady might be thinking and feeling"! Cleage has some friends in high places, so she might have information on that subject that I don't; but I can't shake a mental image of Michelle bolting for the doors and Cleage cooing at her soothingly and pushing her right back in.

Speaking of the coming elections (this generation shall not pass away), Robert Reich has a so-so piece at Salon on Ron Paul's appeal to young voters. In New Hampshire Paul won over "47 percent of primary voters between the ages of 18 and 29", and the GOP leadership, according to Reich, is trying to credit his economic policies for that. "The young," Reich declares, "are flocking to Ron Paul because he wants to slice military spending, bring our troops home, stop government from spying on American citizens and legalize pot." I'd like to see some evidence for either of those claims, but it may not matter. It could be that, as various Obama loyalists are saying, that many people on the left are mistaking Paul for a "progressive." After all, many people on the left mistook Obama for a progressive in 2008.

Democracy Now! broadcast an edited version of the late George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" monologue today, the first time I've heard it in quite a long time. The clip began with Carlin musing on the supposed fact that there are 400,000 words in the English language, and only seven that you can't say on (American) television. As he pointed out, that's quite a lopsided ratio. But as fond as I am of expletives, my first thought was that 399,993 words is quite a large sandbox to play in. Why are those seven naughty words so important to Carlin and his many fans? Carlin jeered at the notion that hearing those words (on American television) would destroy your soul, which is indeed a notion to laugh at; but what about the corollary, that not being able to speak those words (on American television) will destroy your soul? Just to play the devil's advocate, why was Carlin so obsessed with saying those words when 399,993 others were available, many of them quite powerful, especially when someone knows how to use them? Once again I got the impression of Carlin as an angry baby squalling in his dirty diapers.

It also occurs to me that the left in America has often stressed that broadcast media are not and should not be a laissez-faire zone: we want even private commercial broadcasters to have public responsibilities when they get a license to use the public airwaves. As former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps pointed out in the same DN! segment, a sizable segment of the public doesn't like to hear a lot of expletives on the public airwaves, and compromise may be necessary. That segment of the public can't prevent words they dislike from appearing in print or other media, and even cable networks have more freedom in that area.

I am rather disdainful of people who throw tantrums at hearing one of the Seven Words on TV or radio, especially when I consider what they don't object to hearing there. But I'm also disdainful of people on the political and cultural left who throw tantrums over broadcast content that offends them, and want it removed and forbidden. I'd say the first point we need to establish is that the First Amendment guarantees your right to be offended, and that offensiveness should not be grounds for limiting freedom of speech and press. But what does? I don't know where the line should be drawn, and I don't believe a clear line can be drawn. Serious discussion of such problems is anathema in most of the political spectrum, so I don't expect much light to be cast on the subject.

I'm especially wary because I've noticed lately that I'm more bothered when I hear people screaming "fuck" at each other in public, like the middle-aged Hoosier lady who yelled in the middle of the public library about a fucking bitch who called her grandbaby a bitch! In front of her grandbaby, in fact. I didn't, and wouldn't, do anything about it, but I was taken aback. Maybe I'm just getting old. I thought of an old Kliban cartoon which showed two old women walking down the street, passing a young woman having sex on the sidewalk with two young men. "In my day," said one of the grandmas, "nice girls didn't do that."

(I was going by memory, which is never a good idea. Actually not two grandmas, but an old heterosexual couple.)

You Know, I Learned Something Today

2012-01-12T01:25:00.004-06:00

One of the disadvantages of reading a lot, over a period of years, is that I become a bit harder to impress. Not impossible to impress: I still find a good many books that delight me, and I never forget how ordinary the vast majority of published writing is.

There's a famous principle, Sturgeon's Law, named after the science-fiction writer who, when told that ninety percent of science fiction is crap, retorted, "Ninety percent of everything is crap!" It's a snappy comeback, but in fact, ninety percent of everything is just ordinary, run-of-the-mill, average, mediocre. There's no reason why it shouldn't be; the really important thing is that you never know in advance where the extraordinary, head and shoulders about the rest, above average, brilliant-work will come from. And one of the wonderful things, to my mind, about writing is that you don't need special training to do it well, nor do you need to come from a long line of writers. All you need is access to books that other people have written, followed by the conviction that you want to do it too; after that, five hundred pounds a year and a room of your own.

It seems to me, however, that the level of mediocrity in science fiction and fantasy has risen in the past fifty years. By that I mean that even the ordinary writers write better than ordinary writers did in the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. It's partially a result of rising standards among editors and writers alike, plus writing workshops and classes, and perhaps just that a lot more people are writing. What can't be taught, though, is originality -- let alone brilliance.

But readers change too. I didn't know, when I began reading science fiction about fifty years ago, that many of the stories I encountered were reworkings of themes that were already old: the first time I encountered them, I thought they were new. Partly because of the relatively limited amount of sf available to me, I read older work, including Golden Age SF from before I was born, and some of the first critical and historical work on the genre was also being done in the 1960s. So I began to get a sense of where SF had been before I started to read it.

Nor is it a bad thing to take another crack at an idea or theme that's been done before. SF has a number of basic ideas, and I think it was the Noble Engineer Heinlein who argued in the 50s that there are only three or four basic plots. In SF, writers often tried to write the definitive Time Travel Paradox story, for example. When Isaac Asimov began writing robot stories, he was aware of what other writers had done, and tried to put his own spin on the subject. The idea of extraterrestrials coming to earth to bring us the benefits of their millions of years of civilization was also old hat when I first read Edgar Pangborn's 1953 story "Angel's Egg," though I didn't know how old hat it was at the time.

As I got older, though, I began to notice recurring themes and cliches. I liked William Gibson's Neuromancer, for example, but I soon recognized it as refurbished noir, like a lot of SF: just put your hardboiled private investigator on another planet or in another galaxy, give him a blaster and a space suit instead of a .38 and a fedora, and let the femme fatale be a Catwoman, and voila. (SF readers had been complaining about that syndrome for decades before Gibson updated it a bit.) I also recognized that, contrary to what a lot of people were saying, Gibson wasn't writing "hard" SF, the kind that's based in some scientific knowledge and extrapolation: Gibson knew nothing about computers when he began writing his cyberpunk stories. That didn't make them less fun to read: they were very well written and imagined. But they were no more 'about' computers or technology than a Philip Marlowe story: they were about male anxiety.

All this is just prologue to some comment on a new anthology I just finished reading, Human for a Day, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jennifer Brozek, published a couple of months ago by DAW Books. It's an "original" anthology, in that none of the stories has been published before. I presume they were solicited to deal with the overall theme, that of non-humans who become human for a day. (Unlike many such anthologies, there's no introductory material at all, just writer bios at the very end.) That leaves a lot of wiggle room.

I'm not sure what I was expecting or hoping for, but I was let down. Of the writers I'd only heard of Tanith Lee before, but according to the bios they're all well-established and some have won Hugo and other genre awards. The trouble as I see it is that almost none of them have anything to say about the unifying theme. The stories are mostly ideas rather than stories, which set out their situations and characters, describe how the protagonist became "human for a day", and then turn him or her back; finis. One or two even feel like the opening chapters of novels, rather than stand-alone stories, which isn't good.

Almost all the stories are fantasy, rather than SF, which isn't bad in itself -- I like and have read a lot of fantasy. Still. If I'd been editor, the third story ("Cinderella City" by Seanan McGuire) would have opened the book. Here the being that becomes human for a day is the city of San Francisco, personified and humanized by an evil sorcerer, and even in human form followed everywhere by rats and pigeons. It's well done, and it entertained me better than the actual openers did. Ian Tregillis's "The Mainspring of His Heart, the Shackles of His Soul" (gratuitous Harlan Ellison allusion there) is set in an alternate universe where Dutch alchemists learned to build metal clockwork slaves with magical souls, and so came to dominate Europe and the Americas; the theme is the slave's desire to be free. The second story, "The Blade of His Plow," by Jay Lake, is about an effectively immortal soldier who'd been present at the crucifixion of Jesus and so must wander the world for thousands of years until he's set free. It's just military fantasy, full of details about soldiers' gear over the centuries. Several stories are built around war or swordplay, with severed limbs and blood geysers for the younger set. Anton Strout's "Tumulus" flaunts its writer's research on Celtic religion and magic. Tanith Lee's contribution, "The Dog-catcher's Song," is a cut above the rest in execution; Lee has been writing for a long time, so it should be. But the story itself didn't do much for me.

I was entertained by Laura Resnick's "Mortal Mix-up," in which a sophisticated New York vampire finds herself the victim of a body switch with a spoiled teenager. The spell is reversed, of course. I was not entertained by "Band of Bronze" by Jean Rabe, in which several statues from Central Park become animate for a day. Narrated by the Mad Hatter, who's accompanied by William Shakespeare and a soldier from a World War I memorial, it tells how the three take on muggers and purse snatchers, culminating in an exchange of automatic weapons fire and grenades with Crips and Bloods. Rabe has Shakespeare ("Bill") quoting his own plays, probably because she can't imitate Elizabethan English herself: she gets it wrong every damn time she tries, though I'll blame a subliterate copyeditor or a spellchecker for the time "Thou" is spelled "Though." ("Though abominable doghearted hedgepig!") The Hatter, for some reason, speaks slangy turn-of-the-21st century American English instead of the 19th-century British English I'd expect. There's a zombie story too.

I should stop to praise David D. Levine's "Into the Nth Dimension," which I hesitate to summarize here because I really don't want to spoil it. It verges delicately on camp without quite crossing over the line, and sweetly confirms what you always suspected about certain comic-book characters. There are a couple of stories in this collection with passing gay content: it's not their central point, just something that happens to be there, and I appreciated that. On the other hand, it's another of the stories which can't conform to the overall subject, but maybe that's the fault of the subject.

Praise be once again to public libraries, the training grounds of socialism. Someone (I can't remember who, but it was online) recommended Human for a Day, and I'm glad I could check it out to read, instead of spending money on it. Maybe I'm just jaded. Maybe to some thirteen-year-old just discovering SF and fantasy, these stories will be small revelations. Don't take my word for it; read it yourself if you want. Some negative reviews absolve me of any obligation to read a book; others make me want to read the book myself, because I can tell that I'll like what the reviewer didn't. I'd like this post to do both, or either, as the reader finds useful.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

2012-01-11T01:35:00.001-06:00

A friend linked to an article at the HuffPost that began,

"Never try to teach a pig to sing ... it wastes your time and annoys the pig."

My voice teacher had this quote by Robert Heinlein on a sign in her studio.

I've also seen that quotation ascribed to Mark Twain, and I think it's likely that Heinlein got it from Twain; he often expressed his admiration for the old man, even made him a character in one of his early stories, though he preferred not to think too much about Twain's fierce anti-imperialism and anti-racism.

I might have liked Heinlein's maxim when I was in high school, and a lot more unsure of myself and my place in the world. But now I think it's evil. Seriously. And why? Because not many people try to teach a pig to sing; the quotation is meant to apply to human beings, and it assumes that you know in advance who the pig is. I'd like to think this is too obvious to say, but in reality you don't know that. By the time someone has shown their inability or refusal to learn from you, you've already broken the maxim.

Surfing over the Internet, I've been surprised to see how many different ways this adage has been interpreted. Maybe I'm taking it too literally. In the HuffPost article above, I couldn't figure out why the author included it. To one writer it means that "there are times when you just can't reach certain people. You can shout 'til you're blue in the face, but that pig is never going to sing!" To one self-styled skeptic it means that there exists "a strange race of people who believe in angels but not in germs ... a carnival freak show of intellectual, rather than physical anomalies ... [who] almost destroyed my faith [!] in human reason. ... I tried to understand them, but I failed." Who is the "pig" in that example -- the incomprehensible people, or the one who failed to comprehend them? Several writers interpreted after the fact: the people you were trying to reach weren't interested in learning, ergo you were trying to teach a pig to sing. I suspect that most often it's an after-the-fact, ass-covering, sour-grapes excuse for one's own failure. As Xeroxlore in hierarchical organizations, it's popular among lower-level flacks who've been assigned jobs they want to claim were impossible to begin with; and often enough they may be right. But the maxim turned up, described as "silly" and "just for fun," on this page of inspirational Quotations About Teachers and Learning, which I find disturbing.

Herbert Kohl, the teacher and writer, once wrote an article called "I Won't Learn from You: Thoughts on the Role of Assent in Learning", about some reasons why some people refuse to learn things that someone else things they have to learn. In many cases that might be reason enough right there: someone is trying to impose his or her will on you, without regard for your interests or even your needs. Kohl believed "that such not-learning is often and disastrously mistaken for failure to learn or the inability to learn." Rather than engage other people's wishes, interests, and needs, how comforting to dismiss them as mere pigs who shouldn't have been allowed into your classroom in the first place.

We Are the Hollow Men

2012-01-10T22:24:00.004-06:00

When I saw a link to a Salon article called "So What If America Is the Most Religious Nation?" I thought it was by the dread and inconsistent Mary Elizabeth Williams, so I clicked to see what she had to say on the subject. Instead the article turned out to be by one Bernard Starr, "formerly professor of developmental and educational psychology at the City University of New York, Brooklyn College, writes a blog for the Huffington Post. His latest book, 'Escape Your Own Prison: Why We Need Spirituality and Psychology to be Truly Free,' is published by Rowman and Littlefield." (According to the image at Amazon, however, the subtitle of the book is "What Spirituality Provides that Psychology Can't.")

The article itself was about what I expected, summed up well by its subtitle, "If you compare creed and deed, the claim is hollow." Starr begins with a derisive swipe at atheists:

A Rice University study of 275 scientists at 21 “elite” research universities in the United States found that while 61 percent declared themselves atheists or agnostics, 17 percent have attended church services. Whether genuine devotees, just hedging their bets or doing it for the children (as some say), there’s little doubt that America is a religious nation.

I haven't checked all the links in his essay, but clicking through to the Rice study gave me reason not to trust the author. I checked it because I wondered if the 17 percent who have attended church services were 17 percent of the self-declared atheists or agnostics, or 17 percent of the total sample. It was the former, but it's still meaningless. I'm an atheist, and I've attended church services, either with my mother's family when I was a child, or more educationally at a variety of churches with my father until I was about ten. As an adult I've very occasionally attended services with believing friends, but without any real interest (let alone conviction) on my part. I attended Friends' silent meetings a few times while I was in college about 40 years ago, but while I found them interesting and attractive -- an atheist could be a Quaker, I believe, without compromsing his or her atheism -- I haven't been back in a long time. Read the linked article yourself and see if you think Starr described it accurately.

Starr also shows his ecumenical knowledge by rendering the plural of "mitzvah" as "mitzvahs" instead of "mitzvot," though I admit I'm nitpicking. From there, of course, the lengthy piece is mostly about the gulf between "creed and deed" in American religion, ranging from poverty to our inadequate health care system, concluding with our sins against ecology:

In our hubris we forget that we are guests on a tiny rock floating — in an infinite universe of rocks — that uniquely supports life in a delicate balance of natural and mysterious forces. We have the choice and the responsibility to act. Or, as one theologian cautioned: ”God will not save us.”

Another nitpick: human beings are not "guests" on the earth: we are part of the biosphere, no more guests than bacteria. beetles, or wildebeests. (That's an acceptable plural form, along with "wildebai.") He concludes:

What is religion?: Love, caring, serving, giving, sharing, oneness, brother and sisterhood, compassion and selflessness. Summed up: “Thy neighbor is thyself.”

Yet one more nitpick: "Thy neighbor is thyself" is not biblical (it almost sounds as if he confused "Love your neighbor as yourself"), and I couldn't find it on Google. Nor does it ''sum up' Starr's list of virtues. I think it stinks of solipsism: my neighbor is an Other, but that's no reason not to engage with him or her. Like people who talk as though diversity is okay only as long as we're all alike anyway, Starr seems to think we should only care for others because they are us anyway. (We have met the enemy and he is ... ?) Jesus did better than that with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

What really stinks, though, is Starr's definition of religion. First, you can find love, caring, serving, giving, and the rest as virtues in most religions, but that is because they are human virtues. Human beings created and constructed and revised our religions, so it's hardly surprising that our virtues (as well as our vices) found their way into the religions we made. It would be just as accurate to say that religion is hate, disdain, demanding, taking, enmity, indifference, and selfishness, because we put in those qualities too.

Second, most atheists and agnostics would agree with Starr's list of virtues, or most of it. So he's either claiming that atheists and agnostics don't care about love, caring, etc. — which is false — or it implies that we’re really “religious” after all, whatever we happen to think. I think that virtues are double-edged, and can easily spill over into vices, but that's another post. If Starr wants to claim that I'm really being religious, despite my atheism, when I exercise compassion, then he's engaging in religious imperialism, and failing in several of his virtues.

Third, and more important, Starr is playing the game of No True Scotsman. He defines religion so as to suit himself, but he's begging the question. How does he know what religion "is"? I'd say it's reasonable to suggest that instead of idealizing and abstracting, we should look at a real-world religion and see what it looks like.

Read the entire New Testament, or if that’s too much work, read just one of the gospels in its entirety. True, Jesus talks about love, but he also talks about demons, the final judgment, miracles, the wrath and vengeance of God, the torments of hell, and becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven. "Love" in the New Testament is actually hard to reconcile with love as human beings know it.

I've found that pointing this out infuriates liberal Christians more than almost anything I can say about their cult. They pay lip service to "holistic" interpretations of the Bible, but in practice their approach to the Bible is fiercely one-sided. They pick one or two verses out of context, usually “Love your neighbor as yourself” (which is, of course, an Old Testament quotation), “Let him who is without sin be first to cast a stone” (which probably isn’t an authentic part of the New Testament anyway but a later addition), and maybe “God is love” (from one of the Johannine epistles, again out of context) or Paul’s hymn to love from 1 Corinthians. They ignore the context in the gospels: the faith healing, the hellfire and brimstone preaching, the apocalyptic threats and promises, the hostility to sex and the body (such as “If your eye leads you to sin pluck it out”), the hostility to the family in favor of the cult (“Those who do the will of my father in heaven are my mother and brothers and sisters”, “Let the dead bury the dead”), and so on. But reading for context is difficult; cherrypicking verses to bash your opponents with is easy and more fun.

Then look at what people want from religion. A few years ago I wrote about a Pew Poll on the factors that bring the fallen-away back to church. "Those who leave the ranks of the unaffiliated cite several reasons for joining a faith, such as the attraction of religious services and styles of worship (74%), having been spiritually unfulfilled while unaffiliated (51%) or feeling called by God (55%)." Not "I felt there wasn’t enough love, compassion, giving, or selflessness in my life," but something more like "I felt there wasn’t enough praying, kneeling, incense, hymns, organ music, and sermons in my life." To each his own, of course. Look at other world religions, and you'll see that this tendency isn't limited to Christianity. Buddhism, for example, began as an iconoclastic sect that broke off from Hinduism; agnostic about and indifferent to gods, the Buddha stressed right thinking and right practice, boiling everything down to a simple list of Noble Truths. Before too long (if indeed Gautama ever really had gotten rid of these accretions), Buddhism became a religion of rites and hierarchies. In practice, religious includes simplicity and complexity, leveling and elitism, compassion for suffering and contempt for those who haven't freed themselves from illusion.

Finally, to refer back to the original subtitle of Starr's book, neither "psychology" nor "spirituality" has much to be with being free. Most modern psychology denies the existence of human freedom, as far as I can tell: free will is an illusion, we’re the slaves of our brains or our genes. Most spiritual traditions are at best ambivalent about freedom: it’s more a come-on for religious hucksters: come follow me and do what I tell you to do, and you’ll be free! No, thanks. Freedom is a complex matter, but neither religion nor psychology has said much to say about it that I’ve found useful.

I Aim at the Stars

2012-01-09T22:22:00.007-06:00

Stephen Hawking, who turned 70 this weekend, is one of the world's greatest living physicists. Maybe the greatest, who knows? The Guardian observed the occasion with this report, which I can't read without thinking that it must have come from The Onion:

In an interview to mark his 70th birthday this weekend, Stephen Hawking, the former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, admitted he spent most of the day thinking about women. "They are," he said "a complete mystery."

There's no reason why someone capable of the kind of mathematics involved in theoretical physics should be intelligent outside of his field, and it appears that Hawking isn't. Thanks to his motor neurone disease, it's easy for media to fit Hawking into the beloved anti-intellectual mold of the ultranerd who's not at home in his body, or with other human beings. It seems that a lot of able-bodied scientists fit that stereotype anyway. His life would surely have been different if he hadn't had to struggle against a progressive degenerative disease for fifty years, but it's impossible to know how, and anyway, he now is who he is.

Hawking was going to attend the public symposium at Cambridge to mark his birthday, but was unwell after a recent hospitalization, so he let his computer do the talking for him, as he would have done anyway. I saw an AP story about the event which referred to Hawking's "distinctive, robotic monotone" -- that's a speech synthesizer, dumbass! Years ago, during the 1980s I think, PBS did a program on Hawking before he got his computer setup. Hawking was accompanied by several of his graduate students, who'd learned to understand his heavily slurred speech, so they acted as intepreters, rather like the ancient priestesses who interpreted the gibbering of the Delphic Oracle for questioners. The interviewer would ask a question, Hawking would answer incomprehensibly -- though after a few minutes I could begin to make out the occasional word myself -- and one his students would begin, "Stephen says..." and translate. It was moving, fascinating, and somewhat comical to watch. (You can see a much younger Hawking speaking here, with voiceover translation, starting at 2:45.)

That method might have worked better for the speech (or maybe recycled -- it sounds similar to one he gave two years ago) he wrote for the symposium, some of which sounds like fortune cookies --

But his main message was to "be curious" and never give up, however difficult things might seem. "Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet," he said. "Try to make sense of what you see and about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up."

-- or like Polonius' advice to Hamlet. He also rehearsed a popular and annoying scientific hobbyhorse, urging human colonization of space so that the species won't die out when it blows up or simply devastates our planet:

"I don't think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet," he said.

That sentence doesn't make a lot of sense. After all, we aren't going to send the entire human population into space, just a few chosen ones. Hawking's idea of "escaping beyond [sic] our fragile planet" is highly metaphorical; it sounds as though he's going way beyond the available evidence in supposing that we can find extrasolar planets where we could survive. I'm old enough to remember when some astronomers still believed that there were canals, or at least markings which could be mistaken for canals, on Mars. (In fact, "canals" was a mistranslation of the Italian word for "channels", which is what their discoverer called them.) It wasn't until the 1970s that we got a camera close enough to Mars for a really good look. So I'm skeptical of the detailed reports we're getting of extrasolar planets from astronomers now, which are a lot farther away than Mars. Time will tell, but I don't expect to be alive when, or rather if, we get as close to Epsilon Eridani's (unconfirmed) planets as Mariner 9 got to Mars in 1971 -- close enough, that is, to take pictures.

Aside from that, why? Will it really be a consolation, if human beings render the Earth uninhabitable, for the last dying individuals to know that a few of their fellows have moved elsewhere to start the same process all over on another planet? People don't worry about such questions when their personal survival is at stake, but that's just it: those of us who are here will die in any case. If we can't learn to live here, though, I am not sure I'd be in favor of giving us another chance on another world. The idea that it's important to know that the human race will survive somewhere among the stars seems very adolescently romantic to me. Steel-eyed rationalists such as Hawking evidently fancies himself to be still fear their own deaths, which isn't unreasonable, but also the death of the species, which is. I suppose that if cockroaches could think, they'd feel the same way, but that doesn't mean I'd agree that it's important to send a bunch of cockroaches to another solar system either. Let's make our way here, or not at all.

Deaf to Irony - Lalalalala, I Can't Hear You!

2012-01-06T09:27:00.005-06:00

(Unfortunately, it seems that animated GIFs don't work in Blogger. Or maybe they do. You'll know if this one does. If not, imagine Mrs. Palin doing the chicken dance over there, or see it for yourself on the first page of comments on this post.)

I know, there are worse things in this world than being deaf to irony. But speaking of comments at alicublog, I admire this one, at the same place:

Well, y'know, for people who would (and do) abandon morality, honesty, decency, truth, justice, the American Way and ordinary guarded respect for criminal law in order to win, being a loser is, bar none, the lowest thing on the planet.

So, when they do lose, they are obligated by their secret code (I've seen the decoder ring) to blame someone else.

Oh, wait a minute: montag is talking about the Republicans there. He's right, it's exactly how the Republicans act when they lose an election. But it's also exactly how the Democrats act when they lose (or insufficiently win) an election: It's not our fault, not the President's fault, it's the professional leftists who made We the People stay home from the polls because the President didn't do every single tiny thing just the way they wanted it... And you know it doesn't occur to him that "people who would (and do) abandon morality, honesty, decency, truth, justice, the American Way and ordinary guarded respect for criminal law in order to win" includes Obama and his devotees.

It is mildly funny watching the Republicans go ballistic over Obama's appointment of Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, when recess appointments are as Republican as apple pie. (But it's different, says the Wall Street Journal opinion page, because the Democrats didn't like Republican recess appointment either! Even better: Obama is showing contempt for Congress!) It's like watching Republicans who use teleprompters and who worship former Presidents who relied on teleprompters mocking Obama for using a teleprompter. But the humor is merely structural: the hacks from whichever party is out of power will do this to the President of the party that happens to be in power. The only thing that concerns me is that the enabling bill for the CFPB apparently stipulates that the Bureau will be run by the Secretary of the Treasury (yep, that Secretary of the Treasury) "the Director of the Bureau is confirmed by the Senate in accordance with section 1011." But then, who reads these things anyway?

Also funny was this post at Digby's, attacking Matt Stoller's post on Ron Paul. Notice the update at the end:

Update: Stoller writes, correctly, to point out that he never said that Paul was a progressive. He's right, and I apologize for that. But the point here is that he maintains that 1) Paul holds more "progressive" positions than many supposed progressives, 2) that progressives are forced to use specious attacks on Paul to avoid confronting their own demons; and 3) that the federal reserve is somehow responsible for America's belligerence on the world stage. None of those three things are true.

Trouble is, as far as I could tell, Stoller didn't say 1) either -- he doesn't use the word "progressive" in his post at all, and doesn't say what Atkins says he said. (Atkins seems to be confusing liberals and progressives.) Nor does he seem to have said 3), though he did describe the role of the Federal Reserve in US aggression over the past century. As for 2), as Atkins' inability to address Stoller's actual positions is one piece of evidence that it's true. Compare Katha Pollitt's latest column, "Ron Paul's Strange Bedfellows" (giggle titter smirk), which begins "What is it with progressive mancrushes on right-wing Republicans?" and continues with more of the same distortions that have been turning up routinely in this controversy. I could ask what it was with middle-aged progressive women's cougarcrushes on the right-wing Barack Obama; Pollitt was a prominent case of this (she even started bashing other older women for their looks), and despite occasional restiveness, she hasn't really managed to shake it off. She was a lot harder on Bill Clinton.

I'm going out of town for the weekend. Back Monday.

Which Came First, the Madonna or the Whore?

2012-01-05T13:40:00.012-06:00

(It may be like locking the barn door after the horses have escaped, but fair warning anyway: This post uses a popular four-letter word several times, and includes some fairly graphic sexual descriptions, more than my posts usually contain. If that is troublesome for the reader, you might want to skip this one. Just sayin'.)

"It's been a while since I read the Bible," Roy Edroso wrote on Monday night. "Was this Jesus guy Dreher claims to worship as big an asshole as he is?" Maybe Roy ought to read the Bible again and decide for himself, but then it was only a rhetorical question anyway. Roy knows that Jesus was whatever he decides he was, based on whatever Bible verses he remembers from Sunday School.

That's not to say that Rod Dreher is right about Jesus either. Jesus is just a blank wall on which people project their wishes and fantasies about the ideal big brother / son / best friend / scourge of the Bad Guys. (Shane! Come back! Even so, come, Lord Jesus!) The less you know about him, the easier it is to invent him. Roy does much better showing where Dreher goes wrong humanly and politically, because Christianity has no moral content. No one can know what Jesus would say on the subject of the poor, healthcare, and government programs as we know them today; he lived in a completely different world, and he's been dead for two thousand years anyway. If you do want to claim you're following Jesus' teachings and example, you had better be able to heal the sick, raise the dead, drive out demons, and make the little girls go out of their head. Since nobody nowadays can do that, Jesus simply isn't a moral authority for any of us, not even Christians.

But what I want to address today is a comment on that post by an alicublog regular, Fats Durston. It's still on the first page, so the lack of permalinks needn't keep you from reading it yourself if you want to. First "Mr. Wonderful" asked rhetorically, "Wasn't it Jesus who said, "Fuck ye the poor, for they are nuts"? Or who am I thinking of?" Mr Durston replied,

I believe it's Luke 16:19-25. "Now there was a certain rich man, and he habitually dressed in purple and fine linen, gaily living in splendor every day. And a certain poor man named Lazarus was laid at his gate, covered with sores, and longing to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table; besides, even the dogs would come and lick his sores.

Now it came about that the poor man died and he was carried away by the demons to Hades to be tormented; and the rich man also died and was buried. And in Heaven he was lifted into Abraham's bosom and cast down his eyes, and saw Lazerus far away, getting fucked by demons in every orifice."

That's actually a rather witty reversal of the biblical parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. In the original, of course, it's the Rich Man who goes to Hades for enhanced interrogation, while Lazarus is borne by the angels to the bosom of Abraham, which sounds pretty gay itself, doesn't it?

The detail about "getting fucked by demons in every orifice" is Fats's special contribution, though. If I dood it, I get a whippin'! I reflected... I dood it! So I commented:

That's my favorite part of the whole Bible! I bet poor Lazarus had never gotten fucked properly in his whole life, and the Lord gave him hot demon 2 man action for eternity! (I'm always glad to see how liberals really see homosexuality, with a male's being penetrated as horrible torment; but it's okay, you'll let us get married and serve in the military, so I know you're on my side.)

That got me a keyboard-lashing, and not for the first time, because only fundamentalists' ignorance of the Bible is supposed to be risible in them parts. I was accused of being "Leftier-than-thou," and of thinking that the other regulars are not worthy of me. This doesn't hurt my feelings -- they're rather tough -- but it does confuse me. It seems that only Jesus, and in particular liberal kissyface huggybear fantasies of Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild, is off-limits for discussion at alicublog. I've noticed it before: you can attack Christians, but leave my Jesus alone. The best part was when aimai -- who isn't even Christian as far as I know -- accused me of being a gay conservative.

To their credit, a few commenters tried to address my remark about straight guys' feelings about penetration. Fats himself tried to split hairs -- nose hairs: "A male's what? Now, if I'd written 'getting fucked in the ass' by demons, you'd have a point. But I, for one, see demon-nostril-rape as rape, irrespective of the sex of the victim. Maybe it's your own sexism that assumes the demons are male." True, the demons could have been dildo-packin' females, but Fats had written of Lazarus getting it in "every orifice", which includes the anus. And I hadn't said that the demons were male myself; I'd only said that straight males consider being penetrated to be degrading, without specifying the sex of the penetrators or the orifices they ravage. But as Fats said, this is like quibbling over the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin; it's just that he was the one who tried to confuse the issue by throwing dust in our eyes.

Tom Allen wrote "Well, you know what they say -- nothing funnier than a gay rape joke, amirite? Haha -- rape!" I couldn't tell whether he noticed that it was Fats, not I, who made the "gay rape joke." John D. wrote, "I'm a gay male, Duncan, and I understand the distinction being made here. But then, I wouldn't appreciate being brutally gang banged on my first day in prison, either. Go figure, huh?" This only confirms what I was saying: Fats didn't say "raped in every orifice", he said "fucked in every orifice." That he, and others, confused the latter with the former, just confirms my claim: to many straight men, rape and consensual sex are too often indistinguishable.

As I noticed about George Carlin a few years ago,

The Politically Correct especially made the steam pour from his ears, for allegedly referring to “cornholing” as “anal intercourse, anal rape.” (Like so many straight guys, Carlin was vague about the difference between intercourse and rape; the jokes which followed confirmed that he preferred to think of sex as a violation if not outright violence.)

And then there are the guys who try to rehabilitate "faggot" by claiming that they only mean to put down "kneelers," "servants of power ... you know - faggots..." Which doesn't work, because these terms derive their meaning from the association of penetration with degradation.

It's not only gay men who have an interest in this issue, after all; we're really secondary targets, after women. The reason a penetrated male is despised, especially if he enjoys being penetrated and seeks it out, is that 'he's acting like a woman.' (If penetration is forced on him, on the other hand, his rapist exults at having made him into a woman.) A lot of the tension in heterosexuality comes from the conviction that a woman is polluted by being penetrated, and yet under male supremacy every woman must be penetrated. Mothers are holy, and their honor will be defended unto death by loving sons -- yet the Mother was penetrated, and therefore a Whore. The difference between a Good Woman and a Whore is entirely in the eye of the beholder, and every woman knows that she can lose her Good status in the blink of an eye, regardless of her actual behavior. This isn't just splitting hairs: it's a major factor in all kinds of violence against women around the world, and throughout history.

That's why I keep challenging this association when I encounter it, even if I do get a whippin'. It's not innocent. Even if gay marriage is legalized, there will still be faggots and whores. (That's one purpose of marriage: to draw a line between good women and bad, between Mothers and Whores.) What's striking is how deeply entrenched it is. Maybe people can't change their attitudes about this, it may for all I know be encoded in our bodies (though I don't believe it is); but we won't know unless we try. And we can't try unless we realize that it's happening, all around us, every day.

The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good

2012-01-04T18:36:00.010-06:00

My Tabloid Friend on Facebook posted the above cartoon to his feed today. I've been wondering why. Does the cartoonist believe that voting constitutes all the 'doing anything about it' a citizen ought to do? Possibly. I took it as one more Democratic whine about the professional leftists who do nothing but complain about what we think Obama didn't do, and made all the voters stay home in November 2010. I wish I had such power, but it can't be repeated too often that it was Obama and his fellow Democrats who discouraged the voters. I voted, even though I knew it was an empty gesture, except to enrage Obama loyalists who took for granted that as an Obama critic, I must be a lifelong nonvoter. What can you do with such irrationalists except infuriate them?

Certainly Tabloid Friend doesn't think that simply voting is enough. We should all be out there working for Barack, who if we just give him the chance will change our lives. We should be doing fund-raisers, working phone banks, canvassing door to door, and especially not criticizing the President in any way. For the past couple of weeks, especially, TF has been working himself into a lather of fury against all infidels (for they are many, ranging from the antichrist Ron Paul to enemies of the faith like Glenn Greenwald. Predictably, he (and many many other Obamaphiles) misread Greenwald's Saturday column on Ron Paul as an endorsement, but I can excuse that since he was no doubt too blinded by tears at Greenwald's iniquity to read the actual text.

TF also accused Greenwald of "concern trolling," which means he either doesn't know what concern trolling is, misread Greenwald or -- quite possibly -- both. Such misreading is a pattern: TF wailed last summer that Greenwald wanted to impeach Obama and "wanted a Republican President instead" (as though Joe Biden, who would become President if Obama were removed from office, was a Republican), and more recently put up a fury of links to Obamarista attack sites which misrepresented the bill (here, for example) and claimed falsely that Obama threatened to veto the National Defense Appropriation Act because he opposed indefinite detention; but the White House's own statement of reservation (which these sites incautiously linked to) complained that the bill would limit the Executive's ability to decide whom to detain by imposing due process on him. Even Jon Stewart, a longtime Obama fan, understood what that meant.

TF also doesn't seem to think that organizing and campaigning and voting for the candidate of your choice is a good thing, unless that candidate is Barack Obama. Do the devotees of Paul and Santorum and Bachmann and Perry and Cain get credit because they didn't just sit around and whine and complain, like some people? Of course not. They're stupid and vicious and gullible, unlike the Obama loyalists, who are skeptical and critical but can't you see that there's a campaign going on and we have to support the President or McCain will rise from the dead and invade the Oval Office and eat our brains and then where will we be? Our civil liberties will be gone and there will be endless war and a dead economy, that's where!

I haven't had much to say about Ron Paul here because I don't think he's important. He represents only part of the rightwing fringe, and I don't think there's much danger that he will get the Republican nomination, let alone win the election. If that were to change, I might write about him more, but post-Iowa it still doesn't look likely. Yes, he has some positions -- on US war, on civil liberties -- that I agree with, but so did a Stone-Age racist like Pat Buchanan, and I wouldn't endorse him either. I don't believe that Paul has really put these issues on the media radar, because most of the attention he's been getting has been focused on his worst aspects, and are we really seeing a broader range of debate in the corporate media because of Paul's modest successes on the campaign trail? Of course not; the corporate media don't work that way. And you don't have to be a Libertarian to oppose the Endless War, or the War on Drugs, or Obama's enhancement of the surveillance state. Paul deserves no particular credit for taking those stances; he certainly doesn't own them.

Besides, Paul is a Libertarian -- big L, not small l -- and that shouldn't be forgotten. Avedon Carol beat me to a number of things I was going to say about him, and said them better:

Sure, his "libertarianism" seems to be limited to a "states rights" fallacy (it's okay for individual states to destroy your freedom, it's just not okay for the federal government to do it) and then only on certain issues (obviously, not reproductive freedom, a fairly crucial one), but then, I haven't seen any evidence that Obama and his cadre of money-grubbing warmongers care about those freedoms at any level. And while Paul advocates ghastly economic policies, so do the people who currently occupy the White House. And yet, while Obama's supporters would draw the line at raping a nun on live TV (sorry, Glenn, but that's in the "dead girl/live boy" category), they are still happy to support him despite the fact that he is deliberately dismantling the American economy and every feature that might have saved you and yours from various kinds of slavery and unnecessary death. (And, you know, though I can tell you from experience that being raped is seriously unpleasant, it really isn't the worst thing that can happen. I mean, be honest: Given the choice between watching your children die because Obama managed to derail the creation of a decent health care system or seeing Obama rape a nun on live TV, which would you rather have him do?) But, you know, what really burns is that the only person saying these perfectly sane things about stupid wars is a right-wing crackpot, because there is no one in the allegedly liberal leadership saying it. And for that alone, those people deserve to be locked up someplace where they will feel forced to scream about their civil liberties and rights as Americans.

Greenwald seems to have struck a nerve with Roy Edroso, who still couldn't quite bring himself to gaze into the abyss.

In comments, Greenwald says -- very graciously, I would add -- that he did lay out the problems with Paul in his italicized "honest line of reasoning" that a hypothetical pro-Obama liberal would take. I am tempted to say that I didn't credit this because Greenwald had put it in the mouth of a fictional character with whom he doesn't agree, and so I did not consider it his own point of view; but to be honest, my eyes were too filled with blood to read carefully after I saw my own point of view characterized thus: "Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason..." Jesus, Glenn, why not add "Mwah hah hah" and "Pathetic humans! Who can save you now?" while you're at it?

Hm. Obama loyalists have no trouble accusing Obama's critics of being willing -- indeed, eager -- to have a Republican in the White House, or accusing "progressives" who praise Ron Paul for his stances they like of embracing his other repulsive positions but they blanch at the thought that they are also stuck supporting Obama's most monstrous actions. "Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America's minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason" isn't a caricature of America under Obama: it's an understatement of the reality, and one that Edroso spends very little time on. (But then his blog is dedicated to mocking the Republican fringe, not to covering the news.) This is the same syndrome I've so often noticed with right-wingers I've known: they like to think of themselves as hard-nosed realists, but when their noses are rubbed in the horrors their government is committing with their tax dollars, they turn green and look away, and by the next time I see them, they've forgotten everything and have to be reminded all over again.

(By the way, under that same post at alicublog, two different commenters objected to the term "Obama loyalists," denying that they were any such thing. One of them is new to me, but the other was the same person who writes things like:

Whatever my feelings about Obama's centrism I've got to say that he and Michelle really adorn the White House. As a couple they are just...well...magnificent and the children are fucking adorable (same age as my two so I really feel for them). The huffpo lineup of former first ladies and their dresses at these state dinners was like the evolution of humanity from grotesquely old and billowy faux victoriana to blooming, statuesque, youth.

I've never seen her actually criticize anything Obama has done, except in the dismissive way she brushes aside "Obama's centrism." I'd hate to see what a loyalist would sound like, if she isn't one.)

Not that I entirely blame them, or Edroso. I don't like to think about innocent people being killed and maimed and tortured either. Nor am I claiming moral superiority here, an ability to confront evil without flinching. I flinch all the time. But I can't seem to make myself forget or ignore these things. (Just as I don't read alternative media because I have self-discipline and lots of free time: it's because I don't have enough time to spend much of it on the corporate media.) Call it my weakness; I've been called worse.

Greenwald and Avedon also pointed out that we're seeing the consequences of a permanent campaign season. Back to Avedon:

It's now almost permanent election season, which means that we always have to be in partisan mode and never discuss actual issues. We can never acknowledge that maybe a guy on Our Side is promoting bad positions because to do so would give aid and comfort to the Bad Guys on The Other Side. Almost from the moment he got into office, we've been told we can't criticize Obama because it would help the Republicans. We also can't ever admit that someone who isn't a Democrat might actually have a better position on some issue than Obama does. We can't be honest about what's really going on because it might help the Republicans. But it's true that, no matter how wrong and repugnant (and dishonest or stupid) he is on many other important issues, Ron Paul is the only one who seems to have sensible positions about the war and secrecy regime.

To repeat: to say this is not to endorse Ron Paul. It's to recognize that a lot of people are deeply invested in squelching the discussion of "actual issues" because it's all about Our Side and the Other Side. It's probably not a coincidence that Tabloid Friend and Roy Edroso and many other Obamaristas are big sports fans, though TF spends more time flogging sports than Roy does. You cheer for your team/candidate/party because it's your team/candidate/party, and you boo the other team/candidate/party because it's the other team/candidate/party. There's a difference, though: you can criticize TF's favorite teams and he won't freak out as much as he will if you criticize Obama. Before long we're going to see fans on both sides lamenting that the media and the bad guys on the other team/party are reducing everything to personalities, that they refuse to address the issues. And they'll be right, except for their refusal to see that they're also talking about themselves.

Anyway, it seems to me that Ron Paul is a distraction. The Obama loyalists love that distraction; I'd rather not make it easy for them to evade the issues.

Wingnut, Please!

2012-01-04T17:37:00.003-06:00

I'm not overly fond of the word "wingnut," since like so many epithets its use too often substitutes for thought. But today at alicublog I read a comment on this post that did a good job of correcting right-wing fantasies about American history. (Of course they're not only fantasies, like that of antebellum South of benign Massas and docile darkies: a major part of right-wing discourse is that unedifying aspects of the American past shouldn't be talked about at all.) It seems that there's a new TV show called "Hell on Wheels," set in the post-Civil War period, which a right-wing pundit named S. T. Karnick hailed as a new dawn of True Political Correctness on American television. The commenter I'm referring to wrote (no permalink, but it's Mr Ziffel at 10:54:57 AM):

Of course, I don't what the fuck Karnick is watching. The Civil War, mostly through dialogue, is depicted as the absolute nightmare that is was for both sides. And Durant, the somewhat cartoonish robber baron railroader (who is nonetheless well-played by Colm Meany), bears "strong parallels to modern-day Congressional Democrats?" Wingnut, please. The character has more of a resemblance to a Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein, except neither one of those assholes were eating rats or rotten pieces of fruit in Hell's Kitchen as children.

"Wingnut, please." I suppose one thing I like about it is its campiness. I'd like to steal it for my own use, but I'm not sure I'll be able to find the right context. Maybe others wiser than I can do it. Time will tell.

Treating Falsehood with Complaisance

2012-01-03T17:25:00.004-06:00

If this were a higher-traffic blog, I'd hesitate to link to the site I'm about to discuss (linkage is currency in the Intertoobz), but what the hell. This webpage, which claims that a rite of "same-sex marriage" was officially celebrated in Eastern Christianity, has been linked on Facebook by two gay Christian friends of mine in the past week. It's a disorganized mishmash of claims, mixing "same sex marriage" with "same sex unions" more or less at random, and it only really cites one source: the late John Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (Villard, 1994).

I wrote comments to both my friends, pointing out that, while some of the criticism of Boswell's thesis was motivated by homophobia, some also came from gay and gay-friendly scholars. The bigots can be dismissed; the latter group must be engaged. I have my own criticisms of the late Alan Bray's The Friend (Chicago, 2003), but Bray was a gay Roman Catholic historian, so anyone interested in this subject should read The Friend as well as Boswell's book. (Of course neither of my friends has read Boswell, even though one of them is just a few years younger than I am and must have heard about the controversy when Same-Sex Unions was published more than fifteen years ago. As the gay Roman Catholic scholar Mark D. Jordan wrote a few years ago, "[Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality] and, to a lesser extent, [Same-Sex Unions] are talismans more than books. People own them much more often than they read them, because mere possession is enough to allow one to benefit from the results" ["'Both as a Christian and as a Historian': On Boswell's Ministry", 101]).

Jordan's The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (Chicago, 2000) contains a lot of useful discussion of issues other than marriage, but I think it would be almost as disturbing to most lay gay Christians as it is to homophobic gay Catholics. His essay on Boswell, which I just quoted, comes from Matthew Kuefler, editor, The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 2006).

One giveaway in the linked webpage was its quotation from the Secret Gospel of Mark:

"... in the evening the youth came to him [Jesus], wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan." —The Secret Gospel of Mark, The Other Bible, Willis Barnstone, Editor, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1984, pp. 339-342.

The Secret Gospel, you may remember, survives only in a few brief quotations in a fragment of a letter by the early church father Clement of Alexandria, a copy of which Morton Smith discovered in a Greek Orthodox near Bethlehem in 1958. Even if you believe that it describes a gay Jesus (which I don't, for reasons I've gone into at length before), I don't see what it has to do with same-sex marriage. Oddly, the writer of this material calls himself ThosPayne, after the great eighteenth-century rationalist and skeptic; but Thomas Paine would probably have regarded a sodomitical Jesus as further evidence of the corruption of religion -- "The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense," he once wrote -- not as a model for modern Christians.

I haven't read Boswell's Same-Sex Unions since it was first published over fifteen years, but as I remember it he left a lot of questions open, questions ThosPayne treats as closed. Was the rite he discussed a marriage rite, for example, or something else? Could a person who'd made these vows then marry heterosexually? If so, that would indicate that it was not a marriage, Christian marriage being monogamous. ThosPayne claims that one version of their martyrdom calls St. Sergius "the sweet companion and lover" of Bacchus; but even in English "lover" doesn't always mean "sex partner" -- read Shakespeare, for example, or consider phrases like "a lover of good food." What (Greek?) word was translated as "lover" in that text ThosPayne doesn't say, though he does claim that "the oldest text of their martyrology, written in New Testament Greek describes them as 'erastai,' or 'lovers'." That doesn't help, because in Greek you don't have two erastai, you have an erastes or lover and an eromenos or beloved. It's hard to know for sure, because according to James Barr, the connotations of Greek verbs related to eros changed over the centuries, and agape, which is popularly thought now to mean spiritual, nonsexual love, could be used in the Greek Bible for love in such relations as husband and wife. And according to Bray, "wed" means "vow"; so if you find an older English text which refers to "a wedded brother" it doesn't mean that a marriage has taken place between them, it means that they have sworn brotherhood and friendship, which is a very old rite found around the world, and is definitely not same-sex marriage, though it's not less valuable or meaningless for that.

But it doesn't really matter, because none of these modes of relationship are suitable as models for us today. When I've run into gay people who claimed that they wanted a "traditional" marriage, I would point out that "traditional" marriage means a division of roles and labor between husband and wife, and a sexual double standard too. It also means considerable loss of legal personhood for the wife. They usually back down as it becomes clear that what they are imagining isn't "traditional" at all; at best it's an idealized child's-eye picture of their parents' marriage, about which they don't know a lot. Some gay-marriage advocates are quick to assert that they don't want traditional marriage, they want a modern, more egalitarian contract. Fine, but in that case there's no point in wondering whether the brotherhood rite Boswell wrote about constitutes marriage; they wouldn't want it if it did. To quote Mark Jordan again, from the same article:

Even if Boswell's reading of Byzantine liturgy had been unassailable (and it is not), anyone familiar with Vatican responses to rebellious claims could have predicted that official or quasi-official responses would be denials, either by thunder or by condescending silence.

Boswell's imaginary dialogue with the pope looks like another instance of willed naiveté. It is not true, for example, that the undisputed existence of a rite binds present teaching of worship. In the prevailing Roman Catholic theology, the meaning of rites – like the meaning of the Scriptures -- is determined by church authority, not historical scholarship....

Boswell must have known that the role of historical evidence in theology has been a neuralgic point for Catholic thought during the whole of the modern period, but especially since the middle of the nineteenth century. To stake a historical claim is not the end of a conversation about Catholic tradition. It is barely the beginning -- and a stigmatized beginning, at that [94-95].

Let me stress again that Jordan is a Christian, still Roman Catholic I believe despite his conflicts with the hierarchy. One of the friends who shared ThosPayne's article wrote about "secular" responses to Christianity, and I pointed out that all the resources I recommended to him were by Christian scholars. My friend, who's evidently still struggling with Christianity, had swallowed conservative Christian polemic and took for granted that anyone who differed with entrenched church positions must be a secularist. But there's a wide range of positions within Christianity; it's not an atheist like me, but Christians who want you to suppose otherwise. What I'm doing here is pointing out the range of options among Christians; for an atheist like me, these questions are almost literally academic.

"It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance," ThosPayne quotes Paine in his web profile. I agree. As I've said before, gay people should not spread misinformation about us: that's what bigots are paid to do.

Struggling With Christianity

2012-01-03T16:44:00.007-06:00

I guess I stopped posting yesterday after all. Some things came up.

I've begun reading Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality (Chicago, 2011) by Mark D. Jordan, the gay Catholic scholar and theologian I've mentioned before. Even when I disagree with him, as I often do, I find interesting ideas in his work. And so it is here, on the first page. He recalls the 2005 story of Zach, a gay teenager in Tennessee who was being forced to enroll in a "treatment" program called Refuge, which aimed at "affirming his correct gender identity" (ix).

Refuge was then a program aimed by Memphis-based Love in Action International at thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds. It advertised itself as "the most developed ... intensive program in America for youth struggling with homosexuality." According to published reports, participants spent their days at Refuge studying the Bible, undergoing counseling, and confessing their temptations. They were forbidden to watch television or read anything unapproved. Throughout the day, they monitored each other for campy actions or "gay/lesbian behavior or talk." Because these adolescent "clients" spent nights at home, Refuge reportedly searched them each morning for smuggled "False Images" -- signs of gender-bending or a taste for queer culture.

While Zach was still in the program, his father defended the decision to enroll him by denouncing the homosexual "lifestyle" on Christian television and appealing to parental authority. He told Pat Robertson's CBN, "Until he turns eighteen and he's an adult in the state of Tennessee, I'm responsible for him. And I'm going to see to it that he has all options available to him." The state of Tennessee had other worries: media complaints led it to investigate Love in Action for operating an unlicensed medical facility [ibid.].

I don't disagree with anything Jordan wrote here, I just want to add some comments. I was struck by Zach's father's claim that he was "going to see to it that he has all options available to him." That was just rhetorical grandstanding, of course: if he really wanted Zach to have all options available to him, he'd also have enrolled him in a gay Christian group, a gay Allies group at a secular high school, and encouraged him to date other boys, perhaps requiring him to join a True Love Waits group for gay teens. What his father really wanted was to restrict Zach's options. (I keep getting mental flashes of a Roman judge telling a Christian to burn incense to the Emperor [on pain of martyrdom], just to keep all options available to him. Or an Inquisitor showing the instruments of torture to Galileo, just to make sure he knew all his options.) But it's always important to sound reasonable, especially when you're not.

The other part that grabbed me was "signs of gender-bending or a taste for queer culture." It might be, and probably is the case that the kids' Bible study at Refuge was carefully limited to avoid confusing passages. As Jordan knows, and has discussed at length in The Silence of Sodom, the Bible and historical Christianity contain a lot of gender-bending. I'm not talking about the standard infidels' homophobic cliche about clergy in dresses, though it shouldn't be dismissed altogether. The standard image of Jesus in religious art today is not that of a man with a normal, healthy gender identity according to American Protestant standards: the long hair, the flowing garment. These elements can't be explained away as dictated by historical accuracy, since we don't know what Jesus looked like, but it's not likely that he wore long hair. Christians have always invented their images of Jesus to suit their prejudices and expectations: in antiquity, he was generally depicted as a beardless youth with short hair, following Roman custom.

By gender-bending, I mean options like "becoming eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matthew 19:12), but also the popular trope of the (male) prophet as a woman in labor, groaning to be delivered of Yahweh's Word of Yahweh, or Israel as the Bride of Yahweh, and later the Church as the Bride of Christ. Early Christians were mocked as unmanly for refusing to fight back when struck, but they quickly got rid of that requirement. Most contemporary Christians have chosen to ignore New Testament teaching (and Christian tradition) that exalts sexual abstinence over marriage, but this too was troublesome for early Christian men: for one thing, masculinity required men to have women to rule over. Modern evangelicals have always had trouble reconciling submission to the Lord with normative masculinity; it doesn't help that the Bible says they are to submit to Christ as a woman submits to her husband, and that Christ is their head as they are heads to their wives.

I don't approve of teenagers being forced into "treatment" for their homosexuality or gender expression, but that's not exclusively a Christian problem: until very recently, secular psychiatry was happy to mess with young people's minds in those areas. Still, Zach's father has a point: Zach is a minor, and parents have the authority to mold and coerce minor children in many ways. Zach's father can also control his heterosexual life if he had one, or in his religious choices. Liberal parents become upset if their kids get involved in reactionary churches, for example, even if they're college-aged. It's not at all unheard of for freshmen to go home for Thanksgiving break and deny that their parents are real Christians, because of new ideas they've imbibed in churches they explored while at school. That's different, of course, but how different is it?

Thinking about this reminded me of a trend from the 1970s and 1980s: deprogramming. At that time there was a lot of concern about "cults," that is, fringe religious groups with tight authoritarian structures, like the Unification Church, known as "Moonie" after its South Korean founder Sun Myung Moon. But there were others. In true Christian fashion, these sects encouraged new converts to cut off ties with their families and make the church their family. As we read in the gospel of Mark:

²⁰ Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. ²¹ When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” ...
³¹ Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. ³² A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”
³³ “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.
³⁴ Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! ³⁵ Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

Say what you will about these groups, they were following in the Master's Footsteps. Some families reacted as Jesus' family did in verse 21, some going as far as to hire private agents to kidnap their kids and "deprogram" them -- which meant in practice keeping them in isolation for long periods, sometimes verbally, physically and even sexually abusing them until they recanted. The rationale was that they had been "brainwashed" by the "cults" and had to be brainwashed back to normal; the techniques were standard psychological torture, designed to break the will of the subject. The media had a field day with both sides, doing alarmist stories about the threat of cults and questioning the ethics of kidnapping religious believers, especially when they were not minors but legal adults. In the end the fuss blew over, partly because (if I remember correctly) some of the subjects of deprogramming sued their captors.

Fundamentalists were just as hostile to "cults" as mainline Christians; I have read books attacking "new religious movements" from a variety of positions, from fundamentalist to liberal to sociological. And true, there's a lot to attack, just as there is with mainstream Christianity. None of these critics liked to be reminded that Christianity had begun as a "new religious movement" or cult, with the same characteristics as the groups its modern adherents reviled.

If I had to counsel a gay teenager under his or her parents' roof, I wouldn't encourage them to come out until they were old enough to support themselves, especially if they belonged to a very conservative church. Even with liberal parents in the picture I'd remind the teen that parents have a lot of power over them. Where a strongly gender-nonconformist kid is involved, of course, the closet may not be a viable option. We really need to rethink the powers and responsibilities of parents (and adults in general) over children; the potential for abuse is just too great.

If I counseled a gay person of any age who was struggling with Christianity (and I've done so), I'd be a lot more open-minded than most people who think they know me would expect. I once had a long online correspondence with such a person, who was gay and very attached to his conservative, antigay church. I reminded him that Christians disagreed among themselves, so he couldn't really look to other Christians to tell him what to feel or think or do; I also reminded him that he could come out, live a gay life, and still be a Christian, though perhaps not in the church he attended. I advised him to do what his own pastor should (by their standards) have advised: think about it, pray. I wasn't being inconsistent in my own assumptions there, because I know that prayer is often a way of talking to oneself, thinking through issues privately. If this guy prayed and thought matters through and decided that being gay was wrong for him, then he'd have worked it through by himself, not under pressure from me or anyone else. If he prayed and thought things through and decided that being gay was good for him (or, in his terms, that his God approved of it), then he would also have made his own decision. Later he told me that after doing what I'd suggested, he'd concluded that he should come out more, and was distancing himself from his church. If he'd decided to stay closeted for longer, though, that would have been all right too: he needed to come out when he needed to and was ready to, not when I or someone else thought he should.

Whether you see this as a "struggle with homosexuality" (the current bigots' buzzword) or as a "struggle with Christianity" (which I intend to make my buzzword), the struggle isn't going to be resolved soon. Instead of yowling about people who call being gay a "choice," I think we need to stress that Christianity in all its varieties is a choice, and to insist that people have the right to make choices. We also need to deprivilige Christianity and other religious choices -- but that's a topic for another post, I think.

Our Inalienable Right to Spit on You

2012-01-02T12:08:00.006-06:00

It looks like it's going to be one of those days when I can't stop posting.

Whatever It Is I'm Against It posted on Saturday about the latest wave of ultra-Orthodox protests in Israel, defending ultra-Orthodox men's right and duty to spit on eight-year-old girls who dress immodestly. This morning I took a look at the Jerusalem Post article he'd linked to, and it was fascinating for what it showed about the way people react when they're criticized for their bad behavior: they obfuscate and they lie, and they can be quite shameless about it. I almost titled this post "Where Are the Adults?" because as I've noticed before, adults regress to the age of about three in such circumstances.

So, first, the protesters put their children on the line. The kids (and some nominal adults) were dressed in prison stripes with yellow stars of David, and apparently many other protesters wore yellow stars on their frock coats. The symbolism, of course, was that the "secularists" were Nazis, and the ultra-Orthodox were poor suffering victims about to carted away to the gas chambers.

“What’s happening is exactly like what happened in Germany,” said one man wearing a yellow star, who gave his name only as Moishe. “It started with incitement and continued to different types of oppression. Is it insulting that we wear these stars? Absolutely, and it hurts people to see this, but this is how we feel at the moment, we feel we are being prevented from observing the Torah in the manner in which we wish.”

Don't you remember your history? German Jewish men were spitting on German Jewish girls for dressing like whores, and the Nazis started with incitement against them, so they were prevented from observing the Torah in the manner in which they wished and ultimately six million were killed. Yeah, I remember now ... As Whatever It Is I'm Against It said, "assholes like these would have been complaining to the Gestapo that the women weren’t forced to sit in the back of the cattle cars."

(In reality -- just in case my sarcasm is too subtle -- many of the Jews the Nazis killed weren't even observant, let alone orthodox; the Nazis weren't interested in such subtle distinctions. German Jewry was mostly quite assimilated, and the assimilationists -- who often despised "stereotypical" Jews with their hats and beards and forelocks -- were shocked when they learned that the Final Solution was going to "solve" them too.)

Moishe's remark echoes the rhetoric of reactionary Christians in the US, who view the existence of people who practice different forms of Christianity as an assault on their freedom of religion. (For that matter, it echoes the rhetoric of Nazism, which also presented itself as a defense of Christian and Aryan civilization against the Jewish threat.) He forgets that the fuss is over some ultra-Orthodox men who want to prevent other Jews from observing Torah in the manner they wish, by harassing and assaulting Jewish women and girls who don't meet their standards of observance. The same pluralistic society that allows them to observe Torah as they wish requires them to allow other Jews the same latitude, but they've made it clear that freedom of observance is only for them. They demand toleration, but they refuse to tolerate anyone else.

(Still, this raises questions. Suppose the haredi concluded that Torah required them -- as it does -- to execute adulterers. Would they be entitled to demand that they be allowed to do so, in the name of religious freedom, as long as they only executed adulterers in their own community? But it's an academic question, because we've already seen that they wouldn't stop there. They might "begin slowly", but eventually they would insist on policing everyone in Israel, haredi or secular, Jew or gentile.

(And I've made it relatively easy by choosing an extreme example. What about conservative groups, Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu, in the US? Should they be allowed to raise their children as they wish in every particular? If Quiverfull Christians believe that girls don't need education, or only very minimal education, to carry out their God-ordained role as helpmeets and baby makers, does their freedom of religion trump their daughters'? What about the Amish? I don't have ready answers for such questions. They arise in any pluralistic society.)

Angry crowds also followed uniformed police, shouting at them and calling them “Nazis.”

“It’s like how it started with the Nazis – very slowly,” American yeshiva student Salomon Hoberman said, defending the use of the yellow stars.

“They’re separating us from the Jewish people because we’re following the way of the Torah. They hate us because we’re going the Jewish way.

And there’s only one Jewish way.”

Notice how Hoberman muddies the issue: clearly there is more than one Jewish way, since not all the Jewish people follow his. If only "his way of the Torah" counts as Jewish, then his sect is not being "separat[ed] from the Jewish people" by other Jews: they're separating themselves from pagan secularists who claim to be Jews but are not. (There is ample biblical precedent for that move, by the way, both in the Tanakh and in the New Testament. If that juxtaposition sounds odd, remember that Christianity began as a Jewish sect which claimed to be the one true Jewish way.) Conservative American Christians use the same ploy, maximizing the number of Christians when they want to claim this as a Christian nation, but minimizing it when they want to impose their one Christian way on others: then every other Christian way becomes apostasy.

To be fair and balanced, I'll adduce another example, closer to home for me: gay groups that want to maintain 100% gay purity, excluding not only heterosexuals but bisexuals, who would sap their precious bodily fluids with heterosexual cooties, causing respectable Homo-Americans to turn straight.

... Shimon Levy, a young haredi man from a veteran Jerusalem family ... asserted that “the hatred and incitement being directed at us because we do not want to take on the ethical standards of the secular [community] is simply intolerable.”

That's a three-year-old talking. They're picking on us for no reason at all! We didn't do anything ... except, yeah, we spat on some little girls, but it was their fault for dressing like whores! It's not fair! They can dress like whores, and we're supposed to just stand here and take it like it was all right! Do you think it's all right for these sluts to walk around and stick their bare faces in our faces like kourveh? You probably do. You probably go to whores yourself. You hate me, you want to kill me for no reason at all! You're a Nazi!

I don't suppose these reactions are "genetic", as knee-jerk and cross-cultural as they are, but they do seem to come easily to human beings. We can unlearn them, though, and we'd better do so.

No Man Is an Island

2012-01-02T11:29:00.007-06:00

I just had to pass this along. Though I respect and value his work enormously, Norman Finkelstein is not usually subtle, let alone laconic, as he is here. (Thanks to Jews sans Frontieres, where I first read it a few minutes ago.)

A Brief Comment on the Passing of Christopher Hitchens

Even some of the critical commentary on Hitchens’s passing pays tribute to his robust atheism, which no doubt shocked readers of Vanity Fair.

But the ultimate irony seems to have gone over everyone’s head.

When I first learned that Hitchens was diagnosed with an excruciating and terminal cancer, it caused me to doubt my atheism.

Could it be merely chance?

The news came just as Hitchens was about to go on a book tour for his long-awaited memoir.

It was as if he was setting out on his victory lap when the adulating crowds were supposed to fawn over him and—wham!—his legs were lopped off at the kneecaps.

Could it be the hidden hand of a Jehovah?

If I still had doubts, the events of the past week dispelled them.

First Hitchens passed.

If that wasn’t burden enough to bear, the next day Vaclav Havel imploded.

The deep thinkers among us were now beside themselves with grief.

But then, on the third day, Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket.

Was this a practical joke, and who was the joker?

Biblical scholars report that divine interventions usually come in threes.

Moe, Larry, Curly.

Christopher, Vaclav, Kim.

I cannot help but see in this otherwise improbable sequence a divine intelligence at play.

The irony could not be more perfect: the god that the vindictive but witty Mr. Hitchens made a career scoffing at turns out to be…vindictive but witty.

But I will leave the last word to a close buddy of Hitchens’ who is himself a true believer.

When Saddam Hussein was executed, Tony Blair remarked: “I do not believe in capital punishment, but I think the world is a better place without him.”

When I heard that Hitchens was dead, I took a deep breath.

The air felt cleaner, as if after a 40-day and 40-night downpour.

***
I get no satisfaction from Hitchens’s passing.

Although he was the last to know it, every death is a tragedy, if only for the bereft child—or, as in the case of Cindy Sheehan, bereft parent—left behind.

But, still, life is full of surprises.

No one should be too smug in his certitudes.

And if you’ve made a career of pissing on other people’s mostly innocuous beliefs, should it surprise that outside the tiny tent called Vanity Fair, your memory stinks of urine?

The "This Is So Gay" Agenda for 2012

2012-01-01T20:26:00.009-06:00

I chose my post on Florence Howe's memoir A Life in Motion for listing in Batocchio's roundup, but there were several other posts I considered before I decided on that one. Before I write about them, though, I realized that in an agenda I should be laying out what lies ahead, so let me *mention a couple of projects I'm hoping to get to this year after long procrastination. In no particular order:

I want to write a critique of of Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006). I saw this book mentioned several times as a decisive refutation of the prevailing scholarly belief that eyewitnesses -- Jesus' original disciples and their contemporaries -- played no role in the writing of the New Testament gospels. Because Bauckham is a serious, competent scholar, I knew his arguments would have to be taken seriously, so I read his book. I don't think he made his case, but I also realized that his claims were much more modest than the people who cited him seemed to think. He doesn't think that all four canonical gospels were written by eyewitnesses, for example. At most he seems to be arguing that some of the material in the gospels came from eyewitnesses, and most of his more skeptical colleagues would admit that much. But as one of them wrote several decades ago, the hard part is telling which material in the gospels is authentic eyewitness testimony and which isn't. Since the conservative scholars and laymen who embraced Jesus and the Eyewitnesses made it sound as though Bauckham had proven much more, and that modern critical scholarship would now come tumbling down like the walls of Jericho, I wanted to explain why this wasn't so. It'll probably take more than one post to say what I want to say about it, so I've been putting it off. This year I'll try to get to it.

Another subject I've had in mind for a long time -- since before I began writing this blog, in fact -- is that of love and affection between people of the same sex, especially but not only between men, and its relation to eroticism and romance between people of the same sex. I've written about this before, more than once, but I still have a lot to say about it, so saying it is another resolution for the coming year.

The third project I've been putting off is also one I've touched on before: the matter of "gender" and "race," specifically where East Asia is concerned. A recent article at Salon about the Filipino Manny Pacquaio alerted me that the issue wasn't dead, it just had passed from my radar for a while. A related hot issue I wanted to write about was sexual relations between East Asian men and Caucasian men; around a decade ago there was a big flurry of writing about the Rice Queen, much of it racist and/or homophobic, and I wrote quite a lot about without finishing it. It appears that the Rice Queen is no longer the hot topic he was a few years ago, but the issues involved haven't died away entirely, so I might as well post that material here. I also have an article on homoeroticism in Korean cinema that I'm quite proud of. I should do something with before it goes completely out of date; maybe, as I have with some other pieces, I'll just post it here. But first I should try to find another home for it.

Finally, I've been meaning to write for several months about G. B. Edwards' strange novel The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. As you'll see if I finally do the job, it's an appropriate subject.

And now I'll return to the posts from 2011 that I feel best about in roughly chronological order. Aside from my post on Florence Howe (which Howe herself liked, and wrote me to praise), I'd single out "Conspiracies For You and Me," about conspiracy theories of course, which I tried to put into historical context.

I've written several times about what you might call the Grammar Wars, sparked by a Salon essay lamenting Our Youth's inability to handle English grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The first was "Our Miss Brooks", followed by "Taught to the Tune of a Hickory Stick," and soon after by "Comma Comma Comma Comma Come On ..." At around the same time a friend of mine joined the chorus of loud lament for the Oxford Comma; I preferred not to.

In July I stumbled on an article from Family Circle in which a mom griped because Kids These Days aren't learning to suffer the consequences for not finishing projects. It's an evergreen complaint, of course, which could have been (and has been) written at any time in the past 150 years, but I was appalled by the writer's meanspiritedness, so I explained at length why her attitude of punitiveness-for-its-own-sake was wrongheaded.

Also in July I wrote a post on American Manhood, baffled by what still look to me like inexplicably retrograde and simply wrong-headed sentiments on the subject by a fellow blogger.

I wrote two long posts after reading Manning Marable's controversial biography of Malcolm X. The first was on the relation of political violence to Malcolm's career, and the second was on the question of separatism. I think they both turned out very well.

I have several semi-finalists from October. It was a good time for writing about the American Spring, and I wrote about attacks on Occupy Wall Street from the Right. As with that Family Circle article on kids, I noticed that many of the critics of OWS were obsessed with swatting at the Hippies In Their Minds rather than anything the movement was actually doing. As Campaign 2012 continued to heat up, I wrote about the growing panic in the Obama machine, trying to keep on-message while the country made it clear that another message was needed.

Also in October, some science fans, maybe even scientists, issued a challenge to believe in extra-terrestrial life, or else be called a big stupid. I wrote another post on the Religion of Science. Then I got into an argument about the atheist fantasy writer Terry Pratchett and his views on relikgion, which led me to write "What Do You Do With a Drunken Atheist?"

At about the same time I reread Marge Piercy's great leftist, feminist, proto-cyberpunk novel from the 1970s, Woman on the Edge of Time, and spent some time explaining why I think it's as radical and relevant as ever.

During the year I had a lot to say about GLBTQ issues, as always. I quibbled with Dan Savage's advice to a closeted college freshman, and more seriously with the obsession he shares with so many of our people -- inexplicably, to me -- that Being Gay Is Not a Choice. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I think it's a distraction, and really is just one more way we have let bigots set the terms of engagement. Though I wrote less than in past years about same-sex marriage, I did some griping about the propaganda term "marriage equality," and the serious questions it's meant to obscure.

And that sums it up for me now, though I could probably have gone on a bit more; and I will, I'm sure, in the next twelve months. Happy New Year, and fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen: 2012 promises to be a bumpy ride.

The Taste Test

2011-12-31T17:20:00.009-06:00

I've seen this mentioned a couple of times in the past few days. Band of Thebes covered it yesterday. Some comedian published a calendar based on gay male stereotypes, and as a result of many complaints, both Amazon and Barnes and Noble have removed it from their sites. I agree with BoT:

The product is ignorant, unfunny, in bad taste, and steeped in tired stereotypes about effeminate men. It does not libel, defame, spew false facts, or incite violence. At heart, the problem appears to be the silly and mean-spirited attempts at humor are offensive to some people. We are in for a world of trouble if the criteria for removing a product is that some people say it fails their personal taste test. As with the Hide/Seek debacle, I think the best response against offensive work is to make one's case articulately, and shun it, but not censor it.

After all, a lot of material produced by gay men is silly, mean-spirited, unfunny, ignorant, and steeped in tired stereotypes about gay men, whether nelly or butch. Much of this same material is considered to be an integral and precious part of our heritage and culture. If such tastelessness were the criterion for removing material from the market, every drag show in America would have to be shut down, along with Mr. International Leather contests. Queer as Folk could never have been cablecast. All the little storefronts in gay neighborhoods displaying t-shirts bearing the legend "This Face Seats Five" would have nothing to sell anymore. The works of Tom of Finland would have to be locked away -- and that would only be the beginning. I've got a little list ... Why, this very blog would at least be hidden behind a warning label that declares it potentially offensive and off-limits to readers under 18.

People have such short memories. Just a couple of years ago there was a huge kerfluffle because the Amazon search engine wasn't returning any results for GLBTQ material, except for titles like A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. I'm not sure we ever found out what caused the problem, which was fixed in a few days. But many dark conspiratorial speculations went around: Amazon was hacked! Amazon was capitulating to pressure from antigay organizations! Amazon had secretly been antigay all along, but now it had revealed its sinister true colors! Boycott Amazon!!!!

I expect that now, many of the same people will trot out the same kinds of arguments that they rejected two years ago. Like this person, commenting at BoT:

The calendar has not been censored (no change or editing to it's offensive content). There was a market protest against it being sold in the public market. Good. I'm glad this happened like this. Did you want a calendar using the "n" word etc?

Oh, so much stupid in so little space! I'm a little in awe. First, censorship does not mean only "change or editing to it's offensive content": it also means suppressing material from being sold in the "public market", whether by legislation or publisher's or vendor's fiat. Would the commenter feel the same way if Amazon refused to sell, say, Heather Has Two Mommies after a "market protest"? Second, the proper "market" response to offensive material is not to buy it. You can even speak out against it, as BoT suggested, urging people not to buy it. Attempts at censorship have been known to backfire: I've heard that the banning of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791) made it a bestseller, because people who wouldn't have bothered before wanted to know what they weren't allowed to read. At the very least, censorship allows even the author of tacky, tasteless material to present himself as a martyr, and who wants to give Joe King that kind of status?

Finally, "Did you want a calendar using the n word etc?" the commenter asks indignantly, perhaps imagining that she has trumped every possible objection. Perhaps she doesn't realize how much material available on Amazon contains the "n word", especially hiphop music but probably a lot more than that: fiction by black authors, movies by black directors, at the very least. No, I didn't, but if someone wants to produce and sell one, that's their lookout. Depending on who made it and for what kind of audience I might denounce it, or I might not pay a lot of attention. A calendar analogous to King's, but deploying similar stereotypes about African-American males, I'd denounce, but I'd be inaudible in the chorus of denunciations it would inspire. A calendar featuring pinups of sculpted "thugs", for a black female or black gay audience, would be another story, even if it referred to them by the "n" word.

Did I want, say, a calendar using the d word? As a spinoff from her long-running comic strip, Alison Bechdel put out several Dykes to Watch Out For calendars in the 80s. I own most of them, along with all her books. The calendars are probably collectible by now. But I find that commenter's remarks offensive; I demand that they be removed from BoT forthwith! And that's not censorship, since no change or editing to it's [sic] offensive content is involved.

Andrew Sullivan's Hippie Problem

2011-12-31T10:29:00.006-06:00

Avedon linked today to this post (actually a couple months old) by Andrew Sullivan, which reminded me all over again why I hate him. That's a strong word, I know. I'd been mulling over writing a post on how easy it is for other people to hate Rick Santorum, but I can't work up a lot of bile over him. Yes, he's evil, but he's also a joke in the "mainstream"; hating him is like hating Fred Phelps -- easy, safe, conformist. Santorum couldn't even get re-elected to the Senate. Sullivan is also a right-wing Catholic, but he has more street cred in the corporate media. But I think I would hate him anyway, even if he were an obscure blogger with no traffic to speak of, just for his ongoing and unrepentant stupidity and dishonesty.

So here's Sullivan on his change of heart about the goddamned hippies of Occupy Wall Street:

A lot of us have to confess something about the Occupy Wall Street protests: we have a hippie problem. As a post-boomer, I’ve been trained to giggle at them my whole life. And anyone who has had to listen to an unsought diatribe about corporations in a line at Target, or has a friend who’s been trying to talk you into going to Burning Man for a decade, will know what I’m talking about. The crustier edges of the fringe can be as smug as they are alienating—from replacing applause in Zuccotti Park with silent finger-wiggling to the occasional, asinine assertion that the U.S. government is a greater evil than al Qaeda. I have to say I feel exactly the same ambivalence toward the Tea Partiers, with their strange 18th-century costumes, occasional racist diatribes, and gun-toting. Their cultural signifiers distract from their message—which is diffuse and vague enough to begin with. Before too long, I find myself inclined to move on, to zoom out.

I like the "a lot of us" in there -- what if Sullivan was one of us, just a slob like one of us? And "hippie problem" -- was that a conscious allusion to this notorious neocon polemic from 1963? Probably not, Sullivan is too ignorant of history for that. Ah, what a sign of his bold individualist stance, that he giggles at hippies because he was "trained to" do it all his life. He's such a bold freethinker. But didn't his parents ever tell him (however insincerely) that you shouldn't make fun of people's appearance? Even if they didn't, does it never occur to him that a guy who chooses to look like this:

shouldn't throw stones? (The shaved head to distract from the baldness; the bold bandido mustache -- everything that's risible about today's gay male culture.) And "as smug as they are alienating"? Physician, heal thyself. Sullivan's own smugness oozes from every word of this paragraph, as from his self-chosen photograph.

I suppose it must be very unpleasant to have to "listen to an unsought diatribe about corporations in a line at Target." (That's of a piece with his "If I hear one more gripe about single payer from someone in their fifties with a ponytail, I'll scream.") I do feel Andrew's pain. But those of us who live outside (or even, I should think, inside) the Beltway are more likely to hear unsought diatribes against hippies than against corporations in the line at Target, but unlike Sullivan I don't expect everyone in my vicinity to share my personal political convictions, or at least to refrain from saying anything that I disagree with in my hearing.

As for "the occasional, asinine assertion that the U.S. government is a greater evil than al Qaeda," well, asinine assertions turn up all over the place, and more than occasionally in Sullivan's writing.
Comparing evils is a treacherous enterprise, but there isn't any doubt that the U.S. government has killed far more innocent people than al Qaeda has, or that the U.S. government has on numerous occasions used jihadist terrorist groups (including many operatives who went on to form al Qaeda) for its own purposes. Whether that makes the U.S. government a greater evil is open to debate, but I think it means that the assertion Sullivan derides isn't necessarily asinine. It stands in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 assertion that the U.S. government was the greatest source of violence in the world, which was true then and I believe is true now. Sullivan has a record of indignant unthinking fury at anyone (except himself) who presumes to judge the morality of the U.S. government, of course. And as I've said before, I don't judge all gay people by Andrew Sullivan's frequent asinine assertions.

Sullivan goes on to say that he saw the light, maybe because of "seeing a more diverse crowd in D.C. than I expected, or absorbing online testimonies from 99 percenters, or reading yet another story about how corrupt the banking system has become (Citigroup was the latest to have me fuming)." Ah, that's Andrew for you: shooting off his mouth before he knew what he was talking about, even though the information had been there for a long time. (The corruption of the banking system, for example, didn't suddenly become knowable this fall.) But you see, it was the hippies' fault. If they hadn't set up their drum circles, Andrew would have taken them more seriously. Then, of course, he backtracks:

The revolts in the West require nothing of the courage displayed by Egyptians or Syrians or Tunisians standing up to tanks and bullets and torture.

True, true: U.S. state violence has been less extreme (for college educated white folks, that is) than Egyptian or Syrian or Bahraini state violence. But it still takes more than a little courage to face the state violence that had already occurred by the time Sullivan posted this piece on October 22: random and unprovoked pepper spraying, beatings with clubs and fists by cops who had been trained in that work. Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen was nearly killed by Oakland police a few days after the post went up, and we've seen a lot more police assault since then. And before then, too: anyone who wasn't blinded by hippie-hatred and love of corporatism would have noticed that a pattern of state violence, intended to intimidate dissenters, has been in place in the U.S. for many years. Not just Seattle, the various "globalization" summits, and the national party conventions, but America's long and violent labor history testify to it. But Andrew couldn't see any of that. It was the hippies, you know.

Warning to OWS: If this guy has suddenly decided that he likes you, you may be doing something wrong. But don't worry about it too much; it was probably a lapse on his part, and it isn't your fault.

The End of the Year As We Know It

2011-12-28T17:43:00.004-06:00

Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar has carried on the late Jon Swift's custom of an annual roundup of the best blog posts of the year, chosen by the bloggers. I'm in there, of course, but there's plenty of material worth your attention; I've already read several good ones. I will probably put together my own retrospective, as I did last year, but for now I wanted to pass this along.

Beth Westboro Shul

2011-12-27T16:56:00.008-06:00

Which reminds me. This story has been making the rounds, so maybe you've seen it already.

Ultra-orthodox Jewish males in Israel have been rioting again, this time because of women who dress like whores, like the eight-year-old girl above. The daughter of American immigrants, she attends a merely Orthodox school in the mid-sized city of Beit Shemesh, but is now "afraid of walking to her religious Jewish girls school for fear of ultra-Orthodox extremists who have spat on her and called her a whore for dressing 'immodestly.' ... The ultra-Orthodox consider the school, which moved to its present site at the beginning of the school year, an encroachment on their territory. Dozens of black-hatted men jeer and physically accost the girls almost daily, claiming their very presence is a provocation."

When the child's plight was televised, the government came under pressure to do something about it. The ultra-Orthodox fought back.

Several demonstrators were taken in for questioning after police and journalists were roughed up and insulted by ultra-Orthodox men telling them to "clear off," the journalist said.

There were also shouting matches between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews.

Beit Shemesh residents showered police and television crews with eggs and also set fire to the contents of refuse bins.

Here's some video.

Yep, some of these highly spiritual men are being arrested. But I can't help wondering: where are the batons, where is the pepper spray, where are the rubber bullets or even live ammunition, where are the water cannons, where are all the paraphernalia of twenty-first century police response to violence by extremists? Nowhere in sight, and it's not because Israel isn't up-to-date in that area. The rioters -- which is the right word to use for stone-throwing goons -- aren't even being put in choke holds. I suspect President Peres' expressed concern is merely cosmetic, and will disappear when the fuss dies down.

The ultra-Orthodox are an interesting phenomenon in today's Israel. Though they're only 10 percent of the population, they have disproportionate political power, both in the Knesset and in the Army. Israeli concern about what's delicately called "the demographic problem" among Israeli Arabs (that is, they have too many children, and will soon take over) doesn't extend to the no less prolific ultra-Orthodox.

There have also been numerous incidents over the years when ultra-Orthodox men have harassed women on buses for refusing to sit at the back. (Too symbolic, isn't it?) Now some ultra-Orthodox millionaires have proposed a private, segregated bus line to settle the problem.

American enthusiasts for Israel should be questioned about this issue. If President Obama can dodge it, perhaps someone might ask Secretary of State Clinton about, you know, human rights. But there's another side to this: why should the ultra-Orthodox be tolerated by everyone else? After all, "their very presence is a provocation." If they want to be bigots in their own enclaves, that's fine, but when they want to encroach on everyone else's territory, shouldn't the men be required to shave their forelocks and beards and dress like the majority? Shouldn't the women be required to dress like prostitutes? Conservatives are almost always the biggest moral relativists: they want to force everyone else to conform to their standards, but they don't want to conform to majority values. We who believe in pluralism and tolerance should continue to do so, but we shouldn't be impressed, let alone intimidated, when conservatives pretend to be loyal to their allegedly high principles. They don't really have any. Once again it's important to remember the difference between respecting others' right to their own opinions and beliefs, and respecting the opinions themselves. The first is an obligation in a free society, the second is not.

For the Love of D-g

2011-12-27T16:10:00.002-06:00

Two new posts at Lambda Literary got my attention today, though the newsletter has been in my inbox for a few days. Both touch on sexuality and spirituality, and I wonder if the site editors noticed that they almost cancel each other out.

The first was an interview by Christopher Hennessey with the editors of two recent anthologies of gay and lesbian poetry with "spiritual" ambitions. One collection, Milk and Honey (Midsummer Night’s Press), edited by Julie Enszer, is devoted to poetry by Jewish women; the other, Kevin Simmonds's Collective Brightness (Sibling Rivalry Press), collects "LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality." I haven't read either one of them, though I might if the library gets copies; some of the poems described in the interviews sound interesting.

The other article was a review by Jeffrey Escoffier of a new biography of the gay S&M filmmaker and theorist Fred Halsted. I've never seen any of Halsted's films, partly because I'm not interested in S&M, but reading Escoffier's history of gay male film and video pornography Bigger Than Life has made me want to try to track down some of the classics. Many of them are available on DVD. But for now, I'm concerned with something Escoffier wrote in this review:

The one area of Halsted’s life that Jones doesn’t explore sufficiently is Halsted’s radical philosophy of sex. Several years ago Patrick Moore devoted a chapter to Halsted in Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality. Halsted believed that the erotic is transgressive and sacramental, that it is inherently violent and involves acts of violation. “Sex is not ‘coming,’ that is superficial sex,” he once explained. “Mine is personal cinema. I don’t fuck to get my rocks off. In the best scenes I’ve ever had, I haven’t come. I am not interesting in coming. … I am interested in getting my head off, my emotions off—and if I get my dick off, my rocks off, it really doesn’t matter that much to me. … I am interested in emotional satisfaction and intellectual satisfaction.” In some ways, Halsted seems to have anticipated Foucault’s view of S/M as a “creative enterprise” which imagined “the desexualization of pleasure.”

"Foucault's view of S/M as a 'creative enterprise'" reminds me of what Brian Eno, and others, have said about art as self-expression: that you express yourself every morning when you choose your clothes for the day. Anything can be a creative enterprise, from cooking to deciding how to organize your personal library, so it's no stretch to include sadomasochism in the list. I've also run across the notion that sex is "inherently violent and includes acts of violation." Sex, like most human activities, isn't "inherently" anything. One of our most troubling tendencies as human beings is the desire to define our personal tastes and quirks as the essence of the realms in which they occur; such ex cathedra claims can almost always be translated as the speaker's description of how he or she experiences something. For Halsted sex is is one thing; for someone else, it will be something different.

This is just as true of spirituality. (I'll bet you saw that coming.) It's virtually a cliche that the spiritually-minded person finds God (or whatever) everywhere. As William Blake put it:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

I've seen this quatrain on wall posters illustrated with pretty pictures of green blades of grass, crystal-clear drops of water, and other beauties of nature. But everything, and I do mean everything, has a spiritual dimension: self-mutilation, fasting, flagellation, the extremes of asceticism; but also highly oppressive social systems, which are of course ordained by the gods; wars and other forms of human sacrifice. The Bhagavad-Gita, for example, spiritualizes war: Krishna tells Arjuna that the warrior slaughters his opponents not for self-glorification or bloodlust, but in the service of one's temporal duty, so go get 'em champ! And Arjuna did. As the Gita's American admirer "Winthrop Sargeant explains, 'In the model presented by the Bhagavad Gītā, every aspect of life is in fact a way of salvation.'" As the Gita itself put it: "No work stains a man who is pure, who is in harmony, who is master of his life, whose soul is one with the soul of all." Such a man could be a torturer, could drop napalm on children, could set fire to bums, as long as he stayed pure. (I'm not being cynical: see my remarks on the New Age teacher Chris Griscom here.)

Spiritual aspirants have also contemplated mortality, decay, rot, the yucky stuff of life; as well they ought. There was a guy Margot Adler mentioned in her survey of American neo-paganism, Drawing Down the Moon (I read the 1986 revised edition published by Beacon Press; Adler has updated the book several times since then), who argued that there were gods of cities as well as of the countryside, and pagans should acknowledge them; but he was the only person she wrote about who thought so. It seems to me that the kind of spirituality with the most commercial potential among educated (and mostly white) Americans today tries to ignore these matters, presenting a cleaned-up, sanitized product. That's not all there is to spirituality, including the ancient sources it invokes to give it authority.

If Halsted and others sought transcendence through an erotic theater of abjection, abasement, explicit power relations, costumes, and paraphernalia, including "acts of violation," fine for them. They could do much worse. But they have no more business legislating this as the essence of sex for everybody than an evangelical Christian has legislating his or her peculiar interpretation of the Jesus cult as normative for everybody.

As with many spiritualistas, I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of Halsted's praxis. He was, says Escoffier, "alcoholic and tortured by self-doubt and insecurities that undermined his public persona as the ultra top—the role he chose to play in his own movies." Like every god I know of, Halsted's failed him; it couldn't stop him from destroying himself. But then I remind myself that self-destructive tendencies are common among religious seekers and teachers; think of St. Francis of Assisi, who died of complications from stigmata, eye disease, and fasting at the age of 45. Halsted was 47 when he died by his own hand, of an overdose of sleeping pills. It's not exactly news that the spiritual quest isn't necessarily good for the body.

To her credit, Julie Enzser resists the boxes her interviewer tries to put her into.

Sensuality and the lesbian body are big themes in my own writing and in what I love to read. I’m drawn to poetry that includes erotic writing about lesbian experiences; I am interested how we write about our bodies and the physical and sensual experiences of our bodies. Although I would like to say that I think that this is a hallmark of Jewish lesbian poetry, I think it is more of an idiosyncratic characteristic of me as a reader and editor.

She also acknowledges that some of the poems' spirituality, or even Jewishness, emerges mainly in the context of the anthology. By analogy, if I sing a set of songs which explicitly express romantic love between men, then sing one which is ambiguous, you're more likely to hear it as a song of romantic love between men than you would if you heard it in a heterosexual context. (Unless you're absolutely determined to hear heterosexuality except when homosexuality is explicitly invoked.) What presumably makes these poems "spiritual" is that they are labeled so. Hennessey asks her at one point, "Eleanor Lerman’s poem’s ending really complicates what we think about God" (because she writes "God" instead "G-d", as religious Jews often do), and as usual my first reaction was "What do you mean 'we'?"

Once again, trying to subsume all kinds of religious (or other) experience under one word -- "spiritual," in this case, which functions along with "faith" nowadays much as "gender" does with regard to "sex" or "ethnicity" to "race", and "identity" does with just about everything -- ends up homogenizing difference into grey mush. Judaism is historically a religion about practice, not faith, doctrine, or even "spirituality." I don't say that to imply that it's a deficiency (or as some Jewish partisans would infer, a superiority); it's just a difference.

Hey Pontiff -- Leave Those Kids Alone!

2011-12-25T13:34:00.002-06:00

(For years now, I've wanted to write a new set of lyrics for Pink Floyd's The Wall. Mine would be called The Mall. "Can I take the station wagon / Mom, let me use your MasterCard ... All in all, it's just another day at the mall.")

I wasn't going to write today, but then I found this picture and some other things, so here goes. The picture comes by way of Whatever It Is I'm Against It, who notes that the Holy Father doesn't settle for superficial glitter, he wants and gets gold. The Guardian says that he urged his audience "to look beyond the holiday's 'superficial glitter' to discover its true meaning", which reminds me of the old joke about looking below the fake tinsel of Hollywood to find the real tinsel underneath.

I guess I really am a Scrooge, in a narrow sense of the word: I am not a Christian at all, and the story of the birth of a child in a manger doesn't do anything for me. Too many people can coo over that legend while real children go hungry or are burned in drone attacks and scarred for life (look for the story and photo of Shakira) for me to think it has much positive effect on the world. Christians of progressive politics often try to find a left-ish significance in Jesus' supposedly humble beginnings, but the point of that story was that this kid was really King of Kings. In order to make all this turn out right, Jesus' heavenly Father arranged the Slaughter of the Innocents at the hands of King Herod, who was merely an instrument in the divine plan. (The deaths of "all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under" were sad, but fulfilled what Yahweh had said through the prophets, so we think the price is worth it.) Remember that Father Zeus spent his childhood in a cave hiding from his murderous father Cronus, eventually emerging to seize his birthright and his glory. Likewise, the relatively insignificant (his birth signaled by a supernatural star and recognized by Magi and heavenly choirs) Jesus suffered (Son of David), but was exalted to Heaven to bide his time until the day he will judge the nations and take his vengeance.

But back to Pope Rat for a moment. A lot of people like the gold and jewels and rich robes and spectacle, it's part of what they want from religion and from life; if they can't have it themselves, they can at least get it vicariously through others. The Church's ostentation is a symbol and a promise of the glory of God and his heavenly kingdom, and so on; but I'm not interested in kings, earthly or heavenly. (And this kind of thing isn't limited to Catholicism; Buddhist temples, for example, are often decorated lavishly with gold leaf. One of my neo-pagan friends sighed recently and covetously over a photo of a "laurel" crown made of gold.) With the best will in the world, a Pope who tried to live simply would probably be denounced and reviled not only by the hierarchy but by the laity. Some lay Catholics, when I've suggested that Popes ought to tone it down a bit, indignantly accuse me of wanting the Holy Father to live in the gutter and starve to death! The typical reduction of alternatives to extremes, you'll notice, but I'm suggesting a middle path for once. Still, once there are no hungry people in the world anymore, the Pope can have his fancy robes back.

Several online writers have been discussing our other big Christmas myth, Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in connection with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's whining about how rich people are being hated for no reason at all. This, as the writers explain, isn't true at all. Fred Clark at Slactivist (via) reports this year's bandwagon of anonymous donors who've been paying off layaway accounts at various stores around the country, and says,

We like good-hearted rich people. We like them very much. ...
It’s certainly true that we don’t like Ebenezer Scrooge at the beginning of A Christmas Carol, but that dislike has nothing to do with the fact that he’s rich or that he’s “been successful.” We hate the Scrooge we meet at the beginning of the story not because he’s rich, but because he’s a cruel, selfish, greedy miser enriching himself from the toil of the employees he mistreats.
And you know who else really hates Ebenezer Scrooge at the beginning of the story? Ebenezer Scrooge. He’s one of the most miserable, joyless, wretchedly unhappy figures in all of literature.
Scrooge tries to comfort himself by telling himself that he’s just a cool-headed rationalist who sees the logic of greed. He tries to make himself feel better about his abuse of poor Cratchit by thinking of himself as a “job creator.” It doesn’t work. It can’t work. He’s miserly and, therefore, miserable.

This is good, but if I recall correctly Scrooge is a miser because he's miserable; unable to control his life, he can at least hang on to his money. And as several of Clark's commenters pointed out, Scrooge wasn't as bad as he could have been: his harried employee Bob Cratchit gets Christmas off, which wasn't the Victorian norm. Eric Oppen wrote (no permalink that I can find; sorry):

My own take on Scrooge was that he'd been badly traumatized early on. It's often not remembered, but the late 1700s/early-1800s (roughly 1790-1840), when he'd been young, were not good times in Britain, Regency Romances notwithstanding. The economy had been bled nearly white by the Napoleonic Wars, and then you had the disruptions of the Industrial Revolution. Scrooge always reminded me of old people I've known who'd been through the Depression and still were haunted by it.

And he'd earned a reputation for honesty such that his signature was worth any amount he cared to raise, which is not the sign of a crooked man. He's grumpy and cranky...but not everybody likes Christmas, and he has some particular reasons not to. A real hard-heart wouldn't be thinking of his dead-five-years best pal to the point where his door-knocker suddenly looked like Marley's face. It also wasn't his fault that Bob Cratchit had a sick son, or more children than he could comfortably support. And le[a]ve us not forget...he did give Cratchit Christmas off, with pay, which was not the norm in early-Victorian Britain...the holiday had been badly damaged under Cromwell, and many Dissenters and Scots still scorned it.

(Before you sneer at Oppen for dragging politics into the discussion, remember that what he's talking about would have been well-known to his original readers, just as the Great Depression should be well-known to us now.) Backed up by commenter fraser:

Which probably explains why he denounces his nephew as poor when the guy appears to have a very nice middle-class life: In Scrooge's eyes, the very fact he's spending his money on frivolous things like a pleasant home and Christmas dinner presumably means he's heading for poverty.

Still (like some other commenters) I'm wary of the "Satisfied Mind" meme which holds that despite all their wealth, the rich aren't really happy. It's to Dickens's credit that he didn't think Scrooge was unhappy because he was rich; after all, though he grew up poor, Dickens himself become a best-selling author and lived comfortably.

But back to Jamie Dimon. Clark linked to this open letter to Dimon by Joshua Brown, who laid out some obvious home truths:

America is different than almost every other place on earth in that its citizenry reveres the wealthy and we are raised to believe that we can all one day join the ranks of the rich. The lack of a caste system or visible rungs of society's ladder is what separates our empire from so many fallen empires throughout history. In a nation bereft of royalty by virtue of its republican birth, the American people have done what any other resourceful people would do - we've created our own royalty and our royalty is the 1%. Not only do we not "hate the rich" as you and other em-bubbled plutocrats have postulated, in point of fact, we love them. We worship our rich to the point of obsession. The highest-rated television shows uniformly feature the unimaginably fabulous families of celebrities not to mention the housewives (real or otherwise) of the rich. We don't care what color they are or what religion they practice or where in the country they live or what channel their show is on - if they're rich, we are watching.

So true, and it helps to explain why so many Americans (though by no means a majority) worry that tax rates for the ultra-rich might go up a few percentage points, even though they themselves are in no danger of such a fate; they'll never see $100,000 a year, let alone Dimon's $23 million in 2010. These people feel more sympathy for the rich than they do for themselves.

Brown goes on:

Likewise, when Steve Jobs died, he did so with more money than you or any of your "job alliance" buddies - ten times more than most of you, in fact. And upon his death the entire nation went into mourning. We set up makeshift shrines to his brilliance in front of Apple stores from coast to coast. His biography flew off the shelves and people bought Apple products and stock shares in his honor and in his memory. Does that strike you as the action of a populace that hates success?
No, Jamie, it is not that Americans hate successful people or the wealthy. In fact, it is just the opposite. We love the success stories in our midst and it is a distinctly American trait to believe that we can all follow in the footsteps of the elite, even though so few of us ever actually do.

So, no, we don't hate the rich. What we hate are the predators.

I have quibbles about the sanctification of Steve Jobs, who was a contemporary Scrooge (and a predator) if anybody was. But that just confirms Brown's account of Americans' attitude to the rich, doesn't it?

I've been happy to read about the Layaway Secret Santas. (I must say I'm weirded out by terminology like "layaway angels" or "holy mischief" applied to them; "Secret Santa" is bad enough. They aren't demigods or mythical elves from the North Pole, they're people with humane instincts. Why does human goodness always have to be displaced onto supernatural sources? That's the real misanthropy, I believe, the real cynicism and the real Scrooginess.) One of the saddest things I've heard has been the accounts by people who work in the big-box stores of people who've had to return things they bought on Black Friday because they needed the money to buy food or pay the utility bills; but often the returned items had been gifts for their children (which, despite the parents' good intentions, is a reminder of the harmfulness of the commercialization of Christmas, and of childhood. Still, private charity has its limits; Secret Santas are only a stopgap in a bad time. Government-run programs are better, since they are (at least in theory) less vulnerable to the vagaries of donors' generosity or even ability to give: many charities are finding that as need increases, the less wealthy can't afford to donate. What the world needs is an economy that works well enough that people can pay off their own layaway accounts without having to work eighty hours a week.

It Takes a Fairy Tale Wedding to Make Something Tacky

2011-12-25T13:04:00.003-06:00

Somebody who styles himself "the gay and lesbian community of Minnesota" has written an open letter to a homophobe who claims that it was the spectre of gay marriage that caused her to engage in an "inappropriate relationship" with another heterosexual. Quoth the community:

We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry.

Even allowing for the writer's evident sarcasm, I don't get it. I keep seeing these GLB ripostes to bigots' rejections of same-sex marriage that play variations on the same theme, like this one:

Is "the institution" not supposed to be cheap? Everybody seems to want to blow a wad of cash on a wedding, though it's not mandatory; it just seems to be the ideal. I finally saw the Sex and the City movie, and it embodied this ambivalence: on the one hand, Carrie nearly lost True Love because she made the wedding all about her. On the other, if it weren't for the bling -- all the wedding gowns, jewelry, shoes, and so on -- who'd have gone to see the movie? (It's like war movies that simultaneously tell you that War Is Hell, but it's really great Hell, full of guts and glory.)

If marriage is a sacred institution (and many gay people agree that it is), then it can't be cheapened. And I can't help but detect a certain resentment in statements like the above -- the bitch could have had it, but she threw it away! -- for ruining the fantasy. If Kardashian's marriage hadn't gone south so scandalously, the same people who are savaging her now would still be drooling over her fairy-tale wedding, even if she and Kris Humphreys were quietly, privately miserable together.

Of course Amy Koch (the adulterous Minnesota State Senate Majority Leader) is full of shit: heterosexuals were having "inappropriate relationships" long before same-sex marriage was a live issue in the US. For that matter, when you consider what's regarded as "appropriate," a category that includes Solomon's 300 wives and 600 concubines (or vice versa -- who cares?), it becomes thinkable that marriage itself is the problem. Did Elizabeth Taylor "cheapen marriage" by going through eight husbands -- or does she get a pass for being gay-friendly? This polemicist pontificates:

The essential defining quality of marriage is commitment, not the indoor or outdoor plumbing of the committers. It's ALL about staying together, and that's the nature and purpose of the institution.

Of course, staying together is not the essence of marriage. There are couples who stay together for the rest of their lives without marrying, and I've already noted a few of the many married couples who fall apart. (Nor is love the essence of marriage, for the same reasons.) Nor are all long-term, even lifelong committed relationships marriage: some are family bonds, like siblings, or friendship -- and friendship is a bond that has often been valued more than marriage, because it's an individual choice, unlike marriage which has your family's decisions and concerns all over it. Staying together as an end in itself seems to me a hell of a way to live. If you have kids, staying together for their sake might be a reason, though it's an excuse often enough. We hear a lot about the harm done to children by divorce, but less about the harm done to them by parents who stay together "for the sake of the kids."

I think that if we have to have marriage, straight or gay, it should not be sacred. It's often been noticed that American evangelicals have a higher divorce rate than just about everybody else, including atheists, and the usual explanation is that their expectations of marriage are too high, so they fall apart when everything isn't perfect. I'm not sure I believe it, though, because it looks to me as though expecting too much of marriage is a cultural norm. I remember that the American divorce rate shot up as soon as divorce became easier to get, which means that before that time a lot of people stayed together because they were just plain trapped, not because of their superior moral values. (Though we tend to forget that many people who couldn't get a divorce simply separated, and in the good old days husbands might just abandon their families. According to family lore, both my grandfathers did.)

Maybe they made the best of things, but often they took it out on the children. Except for unmarried men, wives were the unhappiest, and except for unmarried women, husbands were the happiest. Despite the propaganda about lonely, unfulfilled spinsters, spinsters were the happiest subset of the population. That's what makes me most skeptical about the whole cultural obsession with marriage. Young women should be warned that they'll basically be expected to sacrifice their happiness to their husband's (yes, even in our supposedly more enlightened time); that pregnancy puts them at increased risk of assault or murder from their husbands; and so on. They probably won't listen. As Joanna Russ wrote thirty years ago (I quoted her before here):

Every women’s studies teacher, for example, knows the female student who comes into her office and announces defiantly that she’s going to get married – the world is still full of girls who think that heterosexual alliances with men represent a form of rebellion against sexless Mommy. How do these young women imagine their mothers ended up where they were? Yet the hope persists that heterosexual activity (a little wilder than stuffy Mom’s) will provide access to the men’s freer, wider world. Mother’s function as the forewoman who polices Daughter’s sexuality, in many American families, gives some color to this notion – that an alliance with men is an alliance against Mother – and yet these girls must have at least the suspicion that Mom made the same bargain. And surely they know that heterosexual alliance can’t confer membership in the men’s world but only a place (Mother’s place, in fact) on the sidelines. But they don’t. And so they end up married, leading the same life as Mother, or – if unlucky – a worse one with less bargaining power. And their daughters repeat the process.

But they should at least be told.

A straight friend of mine keeps nagging me to find a boyfriend. He told me the other day I need someone to be faithful to. "Faithful?" I said. "Like you are to your girlfriends?" That made him giggle and shut up. He'd tried to introduce me to some guy who'd just broken up with his boyfriend because one of them was cheating. How could I resist someone like that? But I did. I admit, I was well into middle age before I stopped thinking in my gut that I needed to be in a couple. Even if I found someone I liked well enough to commit to, I doubt I'd live with him. But that's another myth that needs to be discredited: being skeptical of marriage doesn't mean being opposed to forming couples. Marriage is just one way of managing couplehood, and I'm not convinced it's the best one. I'm certain it's not the best way for everybody.

I still wonder how same-sex marriage is going to fit into this picture. We won't know until enough time has passed for long-term research to produce results. True, sometimes marriage works out well; and sometimes somebody strikes it rich in the lottery. For now, marriage isn't sacred. It's something people do. It could probably be better if we paid attention to what it means, and try find better ways to do it.

Duncan's Latest Mixpost

2011-12-24T16:36:00.009-06:00

There was a substitute DJ on last night's Latin-music program on our community radio station, and his music choices varied from the normal fare. While I like the dance music and ballads that the others usually play, much of what I heard last night shook me out of mere hearing mode into listening, and online searching for more information. Even without listening closely I could tell that a lot of the lyrical content was political; not surprising because, as I found, the singers had political backgrounds.

I discovered that Sylvio Rodriguez, for example, is Cuban, a supporter of Castro's revolution, and has been very influential on people and musicians with left politics around the world. As he deserves to be, given what I heard last night. "Playa Giron," for example ("The Bay of Pigs," as we gabachos know it):

What caught my attention was the music rather than the lyrics, which I still haven't deciphered completely. The music reminded me of other Latin American guys with a guitar I've heard over the years. (Chicago's WFMT had a program called "The Midnight Special" that I used to listen when I was in high school. It's still on, apparently, but I haven't been able to access it for a long time. It introduced me to a lot of folkies and musical eccentrics, some of whom still matter to me, like Tom Lehrer. I don't know if I ever heard Sylvio Rodigruez on "The Midnight Special," but I'm sure I heard peoplle who sounded like him and probably learned from him.) But it wasn't until I sat down to do this post and listened again that I realized that the late Korean singer Kim Gwang Seok also sounded like him.

This song, whose title means roughly "Too Sorrowful Love Isn't Love", imprinted itself permanently on my memory the first time I heard it. (Kim wasn't nearly as good a guitarist as Rodriguez, though.) Some of the lyrics are translated in the comments to the video clip I've embedded here, but I think it communicates its meaning if you don't understand the words. (In one version of this song I have on DVD, a TV performance, the tempo is faster and Kim beams like any other show-biz singer as he sings it; a jarring incongruity. A Korean friend told me that Kim played in the US at least once, at a university in St. Louis; the concert was supposed to released on CD a couple of years ago, but I haven't been able to find it.) I'm going to do a post on Kim later on, because I feel sure I remember a song of his that sounded like "Playa Giron"; I also want to try to find a clip of the song he did that sounds exactly like Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice." If I find them, I'll put them up here; I should have written about this guy before.

But I digress; back to the music I heard last night. First, another song by Silvio Rodriguez, "Ojala" ("If Only"):

I'm going to try to learn some of Rodriguez' songs.

Another singer whose music was played last night was Pablo Milanes. Hm, another Cuban, though according to Wikipedia he used to be "aligned with the government, Milanés has since distanced himself from the official line, to the point of, during the seventies, being sent to a reeducation prison; he has since taken a more discreet line, even occupying political posts in times of greater political freedoms." Sylvio Rodriguez, among others, has performed with him. This was the first song I heard last night that made me pay attention, "Nelson Mandela y Sus Dos Amores". (Yes, that's "Nelson Mandela and His Two Loves.")

Later the DJ played "Felicidad" ("Happiness"):

Sheer gorgeousness. These seem to be more keyboard- than guitar-oriented, but I'll see if I can make some of Milanes' music work on guitar too. It's not all that often that I still discover music that on first hearing makes me ask, "Who is that?" and makes me want to hear more. Thanks to Brother William at WFHB for bringing these great singers into my world.

P Is for Patriarchy (and for Public Relations)

2011-12-24T05:47:00.002-06:00

Katha Pollitt had a good column on the Penn State scandal a couple of weeks ago, and The Nation printed three letters about it this week. Unfortunately they're not available online, so you either must be a subscriber or read a print copy. One of them deserves some attention, I think, so I'll just type up the relevant portion here.

In the once-upon-a-time days of shared faculty administration/faculty governance, the moral climate was wider and more likely to encourage and protect those who spoke out. The decline of faculty authority has adversely affected the academy. ... [R]estoration will take a more persistent commitment to inquiry, analysis and eventually, discovery -- a process that, fortunately, defines scholarship.

I agree that the increasing influence of corporations on universities has not been a good thing, but other than that, well, no. "Once-upon-a-time," with its fairy-tale associations, is a good way for the writer to label the bygone days when scholars were scholars and whistleblowers were encouraged and protected. If we didn't hear as much about sexual misconduct by coaches and players in the past, it was because it simply didn't count. Football players who raped "co-eds" (now, there's a once-upon-a-time word!) or town girls were the ones who were protected and encouraged, not their victims. Not only athletes but well-to-do students whose families regarded college as finishing school got away with a lot. This diversionary complaint reminds me of what we've been hearing from the Roman Catholic hierarchy when they've been caught with their robes up: it wasn't Our fault that children were being preyed on by clergy -- it was Teh Gey, with their shameless Pride Parades! They weakened Our moral fiber!

For that matter, increased coeducation and greater numbers of younger female faculty meant more sexual harassment by male faculty, and again, those who "spoke out" could count on neither encouragement nor protection; for that matter, female students were often discouraged and belittled by male instructors simply for academic ambition. (Speaking out about sexual harassment is still perilous for female graduate students and junior faculty, according to Ms Mentor, and see what she says in this interview about reader reaction to her advice on a husband who hated living in the rural Midwest.) Things have improved since the sixties, but not because of "scholarship" -- political pressure did.

Another letter on the same page deserves mention, just as an omen of what we'll be seeing often in the coming year. "As a young country, we're still in the adolescent phase, thus our impatience with solutions that take time; refusal to support leaders who don't immediately fulfill our desires; and thinking that not voting is a smart move. Fellow Americans, it's time to grow up!" What is more adolescent than telling other people to grow up? But this has already shown itself to be the core of Obama's defense for 2012, though admittedly he and his sycophants have been using it since he took office. Probably his PR people came up with it. I think it says something that Obama has evidently been ready for criticism for the left all along, while he still flops around helplessly when attacked from the right.

The Impossible Takes Longer

2011-12-23T12:54:00.004-06:00

Once again RWA1 has come through for me (unintentionally, of course), this time with a link to a Wall Street Journal op-ed on the "GOP's Payroll Tax Fiasco: How did the Republicans manage to lose the tax issue to Obama?"

The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.
Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

The writer labels Obama's payroll tax cut as a "tax holiday," which is fair enough. He could have done the same of Bush's tax holiday for the rich, which the Republicans have been so insistent on prolonging, but the writer chooses instead to see the expiration of the tax holiday as a tax increase. Such deliberate obfuscation don't help solve our problems, but they may help explain why the Republicans are in such trouble politically right now.

Most Americans favor higher taxes for the wealthy, and the Republicans have been vocal and self-righteous about opposing them. Obama has not been particularly clever in exploiting this, but he didn't need to. Most of us, regardless of our party, have seen the same people who nearly destroyed the world economy carry on almost untouched by the depression. While unemployment rose and people lost their homes by often dubious foreclosures, CEOs and other executives were given extravagant bonuses, even when their companies lost money or collapsed altogether. The Republicans called for more austerity, resisted extensions of unemployment benefits, blocked even Obama's tepid stimulus measures, and fussed over the deficit while many people lost hope for their future. Democratic operatives have been working themselves into a vindictive frenzy because Obama has been criticized from the left, but not to worry: the Republicans have worked hard to make themselves less popular than Obama.

Apart from the propaganda in pro-Obama media, I've been getting e-mail from the source, denouncing the Republicans for wanting to raise "a typical family's taxes by more than $1,000 next year" by letting the payroll tax holiday expire. Obama, by contrast, wants to "[e]xtend and expand the tax cut, helping 160 million people and letting that same family keep $1,500." That's all very nice, and I like extra money as much as anyone else, but even $1,500 is not that much money. It's just over $100 a month, which is not going to help a family with children very much. Of course Obama's playing politics with his tax holiday, but so did the Bush administration, which tried to distract attention from its service to the top 1% with a couple of "tax rebates" -- remember those? -- in 2001 and 2008, which gave the typical family a one-time payment of a few hundred dollars. (Three hundred in 2001, three hundred to 1200 in 2008.) Besides, lowering the payroll tax means lowering the amount of money that goes into the Social Security fund, which is not a good idea to put it gently. (According to Josh Bivens, though, "the legislation that cut the payroll tax also instructed Treasury to credit the Trust Fund for the lost revenue – but since when has being factually wrong defanged a political argument? And who’s to say that the next year of payroll tax cuts will maintain this commitment to hold the Trust Fund whole?")

The op-ed writer also talks about the huge tax increases that will happen in 2013 if the Republicans can't find a way to win the public's confidence. Nothing he mentions suggests that the top brackets are going to pay a lot more if their tax holiday expires, and with good reason: their top marginal rates weren't that high before the holiday, certainly compared to what they were in the 1960s. I'm also skeptical about the writer's claim that Obama has "spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases," which is familiar right-wing boilerplate. They were saying it in 2009, and it was false then. The WSJ editorial page has never been known for factual accuracy either, rather the opposite.

The writer had some recommendations for the Republicans, which RWA1 endorsed. Here they are:

At this stage, Republicans would do best to cut their losses and find a way to extend the payroll holiday quickly. Then go home and return in January with a united House-Senate strategy that forces Democrats to make specific policy choices that highlight the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation. Wisconsin freshman Senator Ron Johnson has been floating a useful agenda for such a strategy. The alternative is more chaotic retreat and the return of all-Democratic rule.

All-Democratic rule!? Oh, noes! While I was writing this post the news went out that the Republicans did cut their losses and extended the payroll tax holiday. ABC News reported that

A muted House Speaker John Boehner announced today that Republicans have decided to accept a short-term extension of the payroll tax cut, preventing a hike in taxes just nine days before the tax break expires for 160 million Americans.

Boehner has a mute button? Why weren't we told this before? But I don't think the Republicans are going to have much success highlighting "the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation," because the Republican "differences" are political concrete overshoes. Not that I'm concern trolling here, mind you. I'm perfectly happy to see the Republicans suffer a humiliating defeat on everything, so I can concentrate more on criticizing the Democrats.

By the way, the WSJ also features something I can't resist passing along: "How to Sneak in Sports on Christmas", by one Jason Gay (which must be a pseudonym). It's sort of like the op-ed piece: how to do what you want to do, no matter what anyone else thinks, while still feeling totally justified and put-upon.

There are 13 NFL games on Christmas Eve, and five juicy season-opening NBA contests on Christmas Day, and at some point, you're going to be following a game on your TV, or your phone, or your high-tech germ tablet, and a disapproving person is going to scold you and tell you to shut that thing off and show some respect. And you will feel ashamed, and promise to pay close attention for the rest of church, or your child's first Christmas.

"In church"? Jason Gay is visualizing some guy in the pews with an iPod plugged into his ear, hunched over the tiny screen as he pretends to be kneeling in prayer. Will Tim Tebow be playing on Christmas Day? Where are the War on Christmas partisans? Somebody call the American Family Association! It's hard to believe that Jason Gay isn't writing satire, but he seems to be entirely serious.

I count myself lucky, though. If I were attending a normal American family Christmas, I'd probably be stuck among people who made those games a family activity, and I'd be trying to sneak in some reading against their attempts to shame me for not caring about the "important games."

Reagan: The Other Third Rail

2011-12-22T21:09:00.005-06:00

Thanks to my Tabloid Friend on Facebook, I know that Ron Paul was foolish enough to criticize Ronald Reagan some years ago. First below is the 1987 quotation from Paul, then Politico writer Ginger Gibson's commentary.

“I think we can further thank Ronald Reagan for doing a good job [on furthering the Libertarian Party]. He certainly did a good job in 1980 pointing out the fallacies of the Democratic liberal agenda and he certainly did a good job on following up to show the disaster of the conservative agenda as well.”
The first rule in modern GOP politics is that you do not diss Ronald Reagan. The Reagan embrace may not be as tight as it was, say, a decade ago, but he is still a revered figure in the party. Thus, the above line from Paul’s nomination speech at the 1987 Libertarian Party convention in Seattle may not go over well with GOP regulars.

Fortunately, some American presidential candidates are cannier and more cautious than Ron Paul where Reagan is concerned. Here's how you do it, Ron:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

Yep, that was Barack Obama (via), during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Or was he aiming for the Republicans?

Grace in Division

2011-12-22T05:50:00.002-06:00

I'm not really a good judge of these matters, but I think the South Korean government handled the question of condolences for the death of Kim Jong-Il rather well, as the Hankyoreh reports it:

Regarding the death of North Korean National Defence Committee Chairman Kim Jong-il, the South Korean government stated on Monday, “We offer our consolation to the citizens of North Korea. We hope that North Korea will swiftly regain stability and become able to cooperate in order to achieve peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula.”
The government also stated, “We have decided not to send a governmental delegation to North Korea. However, we will permit relatives of late former president Kim Dae-jung and late Hyundai chairman Chung Mong-hun to visit North Korea to offer condolences, in return for visits made by the North [when the two men died].” In other words, Kim Dae-jung’s widow, Lee Hee-ho, and Chung’s widow, Hyundai Group chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun, will be allowed to make visits to the North to express their condolences.

Given the churlishness of official American reaction, this was downright graceful. To say nothing of unofficial American reaction, which has been downright shameful. I hadn't intended to post a copy of the screengrab of Kim Jong-Un holding back tears as his father's body lies in state, but it might be a good counterexample to the video clips of wailing North Koreans that have gone viral in the US. Yes, Kim Jong-Il was a bad man, with a lot of blood on his hands, but so was Ronald Reagan, and any criticism of the circus that passed for his funeral was unwelcome in the US. So is Barack Obama, but his daughters will probably weep at his funeral. Yes, some of the public grief over Kim in North is staged (professional mourning is not unheard of, especially outside the West), and some of it is probably coerced, but a lot of it is probably sincere. A lot of the reactions I've been seeing seem to come from American discomfort with public displays of emotion not related to professional sports, plus the connected joy at being able to make fun of official enemies they know nothing about.

I still wonder, when I read mainstream commentary on North Korea and on Kim Jong-Il in particular, how many Americans have forgotten (or never knew) that South Korea and North Korea were one country until the US divided them, admittedly with the connivance of the Soviet Union. There are still families on both sides of the DMZ who were separated by the war and the endless state of truce, though more and more are dying off. It's been over sixty years, after all. I sympathize with my countrypeople's ignorance, since I knew very little more about Korea until the mid-1990s myself. All I knew until I met some Korean students and began to inform myself was what most Americans of my generation knew: that it was a country where college students seemed to be endlessly fighting the police in the streets. These clashes were shown every so often on TV news programs, though it was never explained what they were about. Oh, and there was a war there, named after the country, wasn't there?

It's because of that war, in which over 30,000 Americans and at least a million Koreans died (in much less time than comparable numbers died in Vietnam); because that war was deliberately forgotten in the US (we didn't "win" it, you see, and that's intolerably traumatic for us) though not in Korea; because of the continued presence of tens of thousands of American troops in South Korea; because of longstanding economic and political ties between South Korea and the US; and because the US continues to interfere in Korean affairs, often blocking rapprochement that might lessen tensions or even bring about reunification, that Americans should know more about Korea than we do. But hell, we hardly know anything about our own country, as American Korean War veterans could tell you.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, Americans are in no position to condemn other countries until they have condemned the crimes of their own government, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" as he called it in 1967. Imprisonment of vast numbers of its population? Torture? Militarization? Close surveillance of the population for traces of dissent or disloyalty? Let Americans take the log from their own eye first. That's about the only teaching of Jesus that has any real power to it as far as I'm concerned, and of course most Christians ignore it.

Wake Me When It's Over

2011-12-21T13:44:00.011-06:00

After a bit of a lull, RWA1 has been linking again. Much of it of course was about the deaths of Christopher Hitchens and Vaclav Havel (nothing about the death of Kim Jong-Il, though -- yet), but the fun part was this article at The New Republic, "Why Obama's New Populism May Sink His Campaign," by William Galston, a hack from the Brookings Institution. "Vain hope that this will be heeded," wrote RWA1, a single tear poignantly staining his cheek. (It did occur to me that the "vain hope" referred to was Galston's, but that's not RWA1's style.)

This, class, is a paradigm example of the phenomenon known as concern trolling, where a partisan pretends to be concerned that his or her opponent may be shooting himself in the foot. Oh noes! cries the loyal Republican: Obama might lose in 2012 if he pursues this self-defeating strategy! Usually I associate this tactic with the Right -- homophobes lecturing us that flamboyant Pride Parades will hurt our cause, for example -- but lately I've been seeing it on the Near Right, with many Democrats sincerely concerned that none of the current crop of Republican Presidential aspirants has a chance against the God-King, shouldn't they find someone electable?

Galston's argument is built on some recent Gallup polls which allegedly show, first, "that the number of Americans who see American society as divided into haves and have-nots has decreased significantly since the 2008 election"; second, "substantial majorities of Americans saw expanding the economy and increasing equality of opportunity as extremely or very important. Not so for reducing income and wealth gaps"; third, as "Obama nears the end of his third year in office, the people are more likely to fear government, and less likely to fear business, than they were at the beginning of his administration." The poll question was presumably put in terms of "big government," not just "government," but hey, what's the difference?

Since this was a magazine piece posted to the web, rather than a blog post, it contains no links to those polls, and it took me a while to find them for this post. And I noticed something interesting, which is why it's always a good idea to check claims at the source: Galston paraphrased the second question as "Respondents were asked to categorize three economic objectives as extremely important, very important, somewhat important, or not important." But the actual question was "how important is it that the federal government in Washington enacts policies that attempt to do each of the following" (italics added) -- that is, the respondents want the big government, which most Americans consider a greater threat than big labor or big business, to enact those policies.

That's a common problem with polling, of course: how the question is put will affect, and may even determine, the answers received. I'm not at all surprised that a majority of Americans would say they fear big government, and charitably understood it's not an unreasonable fear. Put in those terms, I and many another leftist would share that fear: of indefinite detention, surveillance of personal communication, and vast military spending in the service of empire. But most Americans also want big government and the services it provides: the social programs, like Social Security and Medicare and disaster relief, that the Right (including both my Right-Wing Acquaintances) hates and want to eliminate for the good of the American people, are very popular. That's why the same politicians who denounce the Nanny State are first in line to demand big government aid when disaster strikes their states. That's why you hear laments from both sides of the Congressional aisle about Social Security being a political "third rail" -- because politicians who touch it with hostile intent will get badly burned, not by lobbyists or special-interest groups, but by the public.

That's why, when polls ask more specific and concrete questions, they get results that appear to be at odds with Gallup's. A recent Pew poll, released at the same time, found (via):

Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. In a 1941 Gallup poll, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents assert that power is too concentrated among the rich and large corporations, but this view is shared by a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans.

Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy and just 36% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and 61% of independents say the economic system is tilted in favor of the wealthy; a majority (58%) of Republicans say that the system is generally fair to most Americans.

The public also views Wall Street negatively, little changed from opinions in March. Currently, just 36% say Wall Street helps the American economy more than it hurts — 51% say it hurts more than helps. Majorities of both Democrats (60%) and independents (54%) say Wall Street hurts more than helps, while nearly half of Republicans say Wall Street helps the economy (49%)...

While there may be some cognitive dissonance here, I don't think it's serious. Most Americans, according to Gallup, want big government to enact policies to expand the economy and increase equality of opportunity. I admit I don't see how people can simultaneously reject the idea that America is divided into haves and have-nots and believe that there's too much power in the hands of a few rich people, but I also have to admit they are two different questions, and I think Pew's version is less abstract. I'm wary of big government, because I know how easily it can get out of the control of the people it was supposedly founded to serve. (And did you notice? There's not a word here about reducing the deficit, which obsesses the government and media elites, but doesn't concern most citizens that much.)

Anyway, these polls indicate that Obama won't be hurting his chances of re-election by talking a "populist" game; that's why he's doing it, after all. (Whether he'll do more than talk is another question.) Especially since it's well-known by now that Democratic politicians, including Obama, do best with their base when they sound "populist"; they only get into trouble when they demonstrate that it was just talk. So do Republicans, for that matter, who also pretend to be populists, but in terms that appeal to a different base. Don't all the Republican candidates claim that they are the ones who really care about the good of the people? The original Tea Party movement talked populism too, speaking for a Republican minority that hadn't voted for the Kenyan Usurper and never would, but still thought he should do what they wanted. But it's a safe bet that Obama is making sure that his real base, the corporate donors, know that the speechmaking is for the proles, and isn't meant to be taken seriously.

What surprises me, or would surprise me if I weren't used to it by now, is that RWA1 misses all this. Why doesn't he make fun of Obama for pretending to care about ordinary people, or if he must pretend that Obama isn't pretending, shouldn't he hope piously that Obama will be defeated next year so that he can't carry out his socialist, anti-business, anti-America agenda? It could be partly because of RWA1's elitism; he considers most of his fellow citizens to be rabble, yahoos who are flushing a great culture down the toilet, putting his NPR opera programs at risk. But if this country is in trouble -- and I certainly agree that it is, but in different ways and for different reasons -- isn't it important to understand what is going on? Especially if you consider yourself to be intellectually superior to the dirty canaille? The TNR writer Galston, by the way, doesn't seem to be concern trolling: he seems to want Obama's re-election. RWA1, like so much of the educated (or least schooled) Right, doesn't seem to know what he wants.

Some of it must be party loyalty. The rational thing for the Republican party to do would be to embrace Obama, nominate him their 2012 candidate, and end the game of pretending that there is a wide gulf between the parties; but more important than rationality is the brand name, which as with other commercial brands, necessitates inventing nonexistent differences. (The GOP! Gets your whites whiter! Produces a longer lasting shine without yellowing! Gives you fast fast fast relief from tension headaches!) Of course the Democrats wouldn't accept that either: they've spent the past three years cheering Obama as he embraced and extended the worst Bush-Cheney policies. Everything they attacked Bush for doing is now the proof of Obama's greatness. Now they've got their own websites defending him against his critics -- of the left; we may be crazy and numerically insignificant but we are still a threat -- in terms borrowed directly from the hydrophobic Republican fringe.

One Gallup poll result I can go with, though: 70 percent of Americans can't wait for the coming elections to be over.

Boy Culture in the Nineteenth and a Half Century!

2011-12-20T15:40:00.005-06:00

I've been reading H. Bruce Franklin's Future Perfect: American Science Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1978), which turns out to be more of an anthology than a critical study. It's worth reading because of the commentary he supplies; he's written a good many books on various subjects, including Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (Oxford, 1980), which is out of print but worth tracking down.

Franklin begins by suggesting what I agree is a "good working definition of science fiction": "the literature which, growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of human existence." He returns to that definition in the book's second section, on Poe, who has often been called the father of SF. Franklin treats him respectfully with appropriate skepticism, especially his program (in a "famous passage from his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales" [ 96]) for the writing of short stories:

The key word in Poe's argument, as his italics indicate, is "effect." The argument that fiction should be evaluated for its effectiveness, its success in achieving the objective correlative which the author desires, slides around the question of what it should effect. To say that the tale of terror is "effective" may not necessarily, in the long run, to praise it [97].

Franklin distinguishes two categories of science fiction in Poe's work,

the tale contrived like an electric coil to induce particular emotions in the reader and the tale contrived as a wheelbarrow to bring to the reader some scientific notion or knickknack. In the first, the science is merely a device; in the other, the fiction is merely a device [97].

Good enough, but Franklin goes still further:

Poe, then, may be the father not of science fiction but rather of what is so often associated with the term science fiction -- fiction which popularizes science for boys and girls of all ages while giving them the creeps [98].

He grants Poe more virtue than that, though, suggesting that Poe is better than his theory. I'm not so sure; I've never liked Poe myself, either as poet or storyteller. But Franklin makes a good point which connects to my own wariness of "extreme" horror movies in our day.

Yet surely those who find "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" of enduring value do not do so merely because they admire Poe for making a story which can horrify them. Would anyone who wants to be as horrified as possible turn to fiction? Or are horror stories merely safe escapes or releases from the terrors of the actual world? In 1854, the same year in which "The Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar" was published, appeared Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Douglass, who had been a slave boy in Poe's Baltimore, describes the incident which awakened him into consciousness of Maryland social reality, the whipping of his aunt, stripped naked to the waist and hanging from a hook, by his master, who keeps snarling "'you d____d b___h'" as he tortured her until she was "literally covered with blood":
The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin.
The man who invented the horrors of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" preferred not to look at these other horrors. In fact he supported the slave system which produced them, as well as his own material comforts [98-9].

I'm not as sure as Franklin that Poe's fans don't necessarily admire him primarily for making a tale which can horrify them, though I would expect that his admirers value his tales for more than one reason. The fans of ultraviolent cinema seem to think that "effects" are all that matter, though. The late Thomas M. Disch, a poet, writer of sf and horror fiction, and swaggering leather boy, wrote a history of science fiction in which he attacked writers like Ursula Le Guin whose gore-and-creepy quotient didn't come up to his high standards. (Her feminism, he thundered, "is less overtly phobic of the male sex than that of Andrea Dworkin, but it is no less absolute. ... Ideology breeds nonsense and ... Le Guin's work has undergone a gradual PC ossification" [via]. Girl cooties, yuck!)

But I very much appreciate the questions Franklin raised here. He made me think again of the idea that Lawrence Block put into the mind of one of his characters, that the tears you shed while watching a movie aren't real tears, any more than the fear you feel while watching a horror movie is real fear. I have the same reservation about the genre that Franklin expressed: if you want to be horrified, why look to fiction? Something else is going on, but what? I'm certainly open to the idea that horror stories in any medium can point to some deeper (or at least other) meanings; I just don't know what they might be, because I haven't found any that work for me that way.

There Goes the Sun King

2011-12-20T08:12:00.000-06:00

Kim Jong Il is dead, as I'm sure everybody in a position to read this blog knows by now. (Judging from what I've been reading online all day, it might be helpful to some readers if I explain that East Asian names usually put the surname first. So Kim was the dictator's surname or family name, Jong Il his given name; Jong Il Kim in Western order.) I certainly don't mourn him, but it's hard to know what to say when so many willfully ignorant people, people who know only that Kim was an official Bad Guy, are jumping for joy at the news -- especially in the US, where many people and our corporate media have been doing the Happy Dance over the guys it's safe to hate in the past year.

There are plenty of people on the Korean peninsula who have reason to hate Kim Jong Il; here in the US, not so much. He hurt a lot of people, but few if any Americans; so why are Americans so excited about his decease? Well, aside from Fidel Castro, we have hardly any Commies left to hate anymore, and for many Americans, Commies have a special place in what we laughingly call our hearts. Second, he was insubordinate, refusing to recognize that we are in charge of the world -- and worse, he played us rather effectively. This was a special slap in the face to American pride, given that we'd always thought him a joke from the day he succeeded his father in 1994, and have continued to treat him as a joke while simultaneously inflating him into a world-class threat to peace, justice, and the American way. Those are the only reasons I can think of, as opposed to pretenses.

It can't be because he was corrupt, as he undoubtedly was -- America gets along just fine with corrupt heads of state and their families. It can't be because he ran a viciously repressive state with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, and a failed economy that periodically collapsed into famine -- America gets along just fine with the rulers of viciously repressive states etc. No, it can only be because he wouldn't take orders from us; why, he wouldn't even take orders from his Red masters in what the deranged wing of the American Right used to call "Peiping." (It was the pronunciation used by Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists.)

My first thought when I heard the news and began to see Western reactions was Suharto, the dictator of Indonesia for over thirty years. Suharto took power in a spectacularly bloody 1965 coup, epitomized by the slaughter of uncountable ethnic Chinese designated as Communists. Estimates range from half a million to two or three million or even more. It seems certain that the US was involved (via) (though given our record, US involvement would be plausible even if we didn't have other good reasons to believe it), with the CIA giving Suharto the names of labor activists to butcher. At the time, FAIR has reported,

After the scale of the massacre began to be apparent, [New York Times writer Max] Frankel was even more enthusiastic. Under the headline "Elated U.S. Officials Looking to New Aid to Jakarta's Economy" (3/13/66), Frankel reported that "the Johnson administration found it difficult today to hide its delight with the news from Indonesia.... After a long period of patient diplomacy designed to help the army triumph over the Communists, and months of prudent silence...officials were elated to find their expectations being realized." Frankel went on to describe the leader of the massacre, Gen. Suharto, as "an efficient and effective military commander."

After having pacified the country,

Suharto quickly transformed Indonesia into an "investors' paradise," only slightly qualified by the steep bribery charge for entry. Investors flocked in to exploit the timber, mineral and oil resources, as well as the cheap, repressed labor, often in joint ventures with Suharto family members and cronies. Investor enthusiasm for this favorable climate of investment was expressed in political support and even in public advertisements; e.g., the full page ad in the New York Times (9/24/92) by Chevron and Texaco entitled "Indonesia: A Model for Economic Development."

A decade later, in 1975, Suharto invaded the neighboring country of East Timor, initiating a quarter-century-long reign of terror, again supported faithfully by the US, which killed a quarter-million Timorese.

When Suharto left power, he received the harsh judgment you'd expect such a person to suffer at the hands of the American media.

In the months of his exit, he was referred to as Indonesia's "soft-spoken, enigmatic president" (USA Today, 5/14/98), a "profoundly spiritual man" (New York Times, 5/17/98), a "reforming autocrat" (New York Times, 5/22/98). His motives were benign: "It was not simply personal ambition that led Mr. Suharto to clamp down so hard for so long; it was a fear, shared by many in this country of 210 million people, of chaos" (New York Times, 6/2/98); he "failed to comprehend the intensity of his people's discontent" (New York Times, 5/21/98), otherwise he undoubtedly would have stepped down earlier. He was sometimes described as "authoritarian," occasionally as a "dictator," but never as a mass murderer. Suharto's mass killings were referred to--if at all--in a brief and antiseptic paragraph.

I believe Kim Jong Il deserves nothing less than the same kind of pitiless scourging Suharto got.

By all accounts, North Korea is a dreary, regimented society, with no civil liberties and little material security. (A good place to begin reading if you want to know more would be Bruce Cumings's North Korea: Another Country [The New Press, 2004].) At the same time, I keep getting the impression that much of what is depicted as grim regimentation is simply normal for communitarian societies, including South Korea. I remember reading a sketch of a North Korean extended family, comprising at least three generations, out for a night of karaoke, which from the description sounded just like its South Korean working-class counterpart. The massed rallies and organizing chanting also sound to me like South Korean society in the days of its dictatorship: GoGo 70, a recent South Korean film set around 1970, began with archival footage of marching soldiers, cheering crowds, and martial songs that at first I took for the North, but it turned out to the freedom-loving South. And the standard of living was higher in the North than in the South until the 1970s, partly because until then the South was run by corrupt American-backed dictatorships more interested in lining their pockets than in raising up their people. Not until Park Chung Hee's Five Year Plans (did he deliberately take that label from Stalin's USSR?) did the South Korean economy begin to take off, though as with all modernizing industrial economies, at great human cost.

But despite the occasional concern trolling -- oh worra worra, what will happen to North Korea now that Kim is dead? is his young heir-designate, Kim Jong Un, mature enough at twenty-something to take the reins of power? surely he should invite the US to step in and guide him with the same benign wisdom we've exhibited everywhere else -- I don't believe that many of the people celebrating Kim's dead give a damn about the North Korean people, or about peace on the Korean peninsula, or about anything except venting the free-floating rage and hatred they don't dare express about anything that matters. The US government is no more interested in democracy in North Korea than it is in the South, which means (at best) hardly at all; and most Americans don't know enough about either Korea to have an opinion.