Let Your Yes Be Yes, and Your No Be No

Just a brief addition to yesterday's post.  On Sunday, Doonesbury's "Say What?" department posted this nugget from Sean Hannity:

This was supposed to be an outrageous idea.  My "say what?" reaction wss "Wait, doesn't the Pope get questioned?" I don't follow Vatican news, but what I remember are a lot of stories where Pope Francis had told reporters something that was taken to be highly liberal and inclusive, like pets going to Heaven, or that homosexuals have a right to be part of the family, or that in some lost video interview he'd endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples. In that last case it turned out that before he became Pope he offered to accept such unions in Argentina as a bargaining chip to stave off legal same-sex marriage. He failed to do so, but his fans (even non-Catholics) were ready to celebrate him as an ally anyway.  When he said we have a right to be part of the family, he immediately added "That does not mean approving of homosexual acts, not in the least."

As I wrote on this topic before, "many people scour Francis's statements for what they 'hint' or may  'imply' or 'suggest,' as if he were the Delphic Oracle and no one has any business pressing him to make himself clear.  Part of the problem of course is that even when he is reasonably clear, they still overinterpret him to suit their own fantasies.  Maybe that's it: if they got him to clarify, they wouldn't like what he'd tell them."

I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that a Pope, like any other head of state, should have to face hard questions. While Hannity is technically correct that Donald Trump "takes questions all the time," Trump doesn't usually answer them: he lies, distracts, wanders off the subject, blusters; and if a reporter presses him, he turns nasty.  But then, the media don't know how to ask intelligent hard questions, and I don't believe Hannity would be any different.  Even secular US reporters would be too busy bowing and scraping and calling him "Your Holiness" to do their job properly. (I just thought of the time some US gay male activists were permitted to ask the Dalai Lama to clarify his position on homosexuality.  They were all Buddhists, if memory serves, and too thrilled at being in the Presence to push very hard; the DL was also less than forthcoming, and of course there was also the language barrier.  Yet the DL is much less pompous than most high-level holy men.  I should do a post on that encounter soon.)

I don't know, maybe Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, is a Catholic too. But the reaction to Hannity's suggestion was just another example of the weird authoritarianism that's common among American liberals, the idea that commoners shouldn't get above ourselves when we're allowed to be in the same space as royalty.

The title of this post comes from Matthew 5:37, which I think is good advice, even though Jesus himself liked to dodge hard questions like "What is your authority to say these things?" or "Should we pay tribute to Caesar?" Pope Leo likes to quote the Bible at times, but he also gets rather woolly at others. But it would be rude to quote Matthew 5:37 to him - who do I think I am, anyway?

Killing Me Politely With His Norms

Last Sunday's Doonesbury was appalling.  Embarrassing.  Repellent... I'm trying to find the right epithet, but you get the idea.  I've been trying to find a way to read it as sarcasm, but can't find a handhold.  "Did I mention that I was polite?" would give it away if it were the Onion, but Trudeau's not the Onion.  The same applies to the way Norm appears as a Rainbow Coalition parade of Diverse faces; could Trudeau be referring to the will.i.am Obama campaign video featuring multicolored celebrity dreamers?  If only.  No, Trudeau's been hammering a pretty solid DNC beat since Trump became president, as subtle as a MAGA hat.

I thought that Corey Robin had posted a tweet to the effect that norms are conservative, in intention and function.  Which is not always a bad thing.  But I can't find it now.  I did, while looking, find this article by Robin at Jacobin, in which he invites the reader to imagine

that it’s 2020, and Sanders is elected with a somewhat radicalized Democratic Party in Congress. Or if that’s too much to swallow, imagine some version of that (not necessarily Sanders or the Democrats but an empowered electoral left) in 2024. Or a realignment of the sort the US saw in 1932. Realignments always involve a contestation over norms; realignments change norms; realignments erode norms. And all of these counsels against norm erosion and polarization — which many people in the media and academia are invoking against Trump and the GOP — will now come rushing back at the Left.

And how could they not? When you set up “norms” as your standard, without evaluating their specific democratic valence in each instance, the projects to which they are attached, how could you know whether a norm contributes to democracy, in the substantive or procedural sense, or detracts from it? How could you know whether the erosion is good or bad, democratic or antidemocratic?

As I've said before, it's not enough to stand by your principles: first you have to have good ones.  Norms gave us the 3/5 clause of the Constitution, the Fugitive Slave Act, the expulsion of Indians from their land, the restriction of the franchise, right down to endless war, state surveillance of citizens, and so on and on.  The furious protests of pundits and politicians, liberal and conservative alike, that Trump's behavior on this or that issue is unprecedented, are in large part attempts to deny the norms that characterize this country by denying history.

Like a Prayer

Last Sunday's Doonesbury strip made an impression on me.  Mike Doonesbury and Bernie are reflecting on aging, and Mike says that the worst thing about it is being invisible, because a waitress didn't look at him.  Bernie points out that she probably wouldn't have noticed either of them when they were young.  "At least there was a prayer!" Mike expostulates.  Bernie doesn't think so; I think he's right.

Losing visibility as we age is a common complaint, and it seems to be worse for women than for men. The reason this comic strip got my attention is that as an older gay man who'd never been hot, I'd fully expected to become invisible myself.  This expectation didn't bother me all that much, since I'd never felt visible before, so I wasn't facing much of a change.  A few years ago, however, it dawned on me that it hadn't happened. If anything, I felt more visible.  People of both sexes and all ages noticed me, were friendly, smiled at me on the street.  (And I continued to find sexual partners.)  I'd already noticed that Americans seemed to have become friendlier since September 11, 2001, but I'd still expected to vanish from most people's radar as I moved into my fifties.

It was a truth universally acknowledged when I made my debut in the gay male community that an older gay man -- anyone over, say, twenty-five -- might as well stop thinking about sex unless he wanted to pay for it.  I continued hearing this until I was well into middle age, and if I don't hear gay men saying it now, it's probably because I don't spend much time around gay men these days.  I'm not particularly concerned with sexual visibility in this post, though it's clear that sexual visibility is mostly what Mike Doonesbury and the female writers I've read on this subject are talking about.  As Bernie says to Mike, it's only because the waitress was hot that he noticed her not noticing him.  When I was in my mid-twenties, I knew a gay man about twenty years my senior who spent much of his time complaining that no one wants you when you're old and gay; I soon found out that he was making out more than I was.  I also noticed that he was pretty aggressive in his pursuit of attractive younger men, much more so than I have ever dared to be.  (The combination of low self-esteem and general social homophobia made me assume that taking any sexual initiative toward another male was a recipe for disastrous, shaming rejection.  I've gotten over a lot of that, but I still am not as grabby as this man was.  But it's why I'm derisive when some straight men assume that gay men -- let alone straight women -- don't have any anxieties or insecurities about their desirability.)

So, as I got older, I anticipated with the day when I would be Too Old to get laid.  I'm sixty-four now, and it still hasn't arrived.  Since my personal style, social as well as sexual, has always been to let somebody else make the first move, I've been pleasantly surprised to find that there are still people who will make that first move.  One reason I've stuck with this style is that, for me, it has worked.  That has always surprised me, because I can be truculent, combative, and cynical; I have a Bitchy Resting Face that age and gravity haven't ameliorated, and I've been told that many people find me intimidating.  But I've learned that at least as many people find me approachable, and I've even come to believe it.

That's not the same thing as believing I'm entitled to be approached.  I don't have to be liked by everybody, just by enough people -- and I suspect that "enough people" for me is a smaller number than "enough people" for many others.  I think that's what Mike Doonesbury and people like him are complaining about.  Since nobody, no matter how hot, really is liked by everybody, I speculate that they're upset because this or that specific person -- a hot waitress at Applebee's, say -- didn't immediately slip them her phone number; then, like a kid, they immediately generalize "one person" to "everybody in the whole world," and "one hot person didn't desire me" to "everybody in the world hates me!" to "nobody is interested in older people, I might as well just die right now!"

I've learned from experience, and as I've gotten older I've learned to take more initiative: to smile at strangers, to offer conversation, to notice people.  Again, one requirement of doing so is recognizing that when someone doesn't pick up the thread, I should let them be.  I have a horror of becoming like the garrulous (but no doubt lonely) older man I once saw monopolizing the attention of a clerk (young, male) in a record store with endless technical discussion of this or that recording.  It's one reason I have this blog, where I can hold forth endlessly if I want, and no one is obliged to listen if they don't want to.  But it's certainly very satisfying to have found that I can give attention as well as receive it, and the world has become a lot more comfortable for me as a result.

I'm writing this not to boast, though lately I've been feeling all over again just how lucky I am and have felt a need to talk or write about it.  The next thought I have is why other people, people surely more attractive and socially competent than I've ever been, don't have similar experiences; or why, if they do have similar experiences, why they don't recognize them and prefer to wallow in self-pity.  Take Mike Doonesbury, fictional comics character though he is: he's had two attractive wives, one of whom he's still with.  Though he's fictional, he certainly has real-life counterparts. There's no reason why people should have an accurate self-image or an accurate accounting of how other people interact with them.  It might even be that some people get satisfaction of a kind from seeing themselves as invisible, excluded, shunned when they aren't.  But it makes me wonder, and not for the first time, how many of people's problems are of their own invention.

Every Zygote is Sacred

Doonesbury has been in the news again, as various newspapers around the country refused to run a sequence on abortion -- specifically on legal requirements that a woman seeking an abortion must submit to a transvaginal ultrasound procedure.

This morning I looked at some of the entries in the "Blowback" department, where readers comment. This one, from a guy in El Dorado, Arkansas, caught my eye:

A woman who aborts is going against the evolutionary imperative of millions of years. But she is improving the human gene pool, in a Darwinian sense. It is not the government's business one way or another, unless you believe that life begins at some arbitrary point, after which it would be manslaughter. I suspect there will be no end to this controversy.

Ah, pop Darwinism; he might as well have said that abortion goes against the will of God. The closest this comes to reality is that Darwin himself opposed birth control (as well as the English poor-relief laws), but since Darwin wasn't God or the Voice of Nature, that's unimportant. Not that it would matter if he were.

The notion that abortion (or anything else) is in conflict with an "evolutionary imperative of millions of years" (which has an intriguing formal resemblance to claims about "the five thousand year old definition of marriage") is ridiculous, however often people say such things. Natural selection has no more moral authority than, say, the Bible.

It's especially curious that people should talk as though preserving every individual life is an evolutionary necessity, given the popularity of self-congratulatory memes like The Darwin Awards, which eke comedy from the notion that some people are too dumb to reproduce, or even to live. Half of the theory of natural selection is that some individuals are removed from the playing field. (Notice too the commenter's claim that a woman who gets an abortion is "improving the human gene pool, in the Darwinian sense", presumably forgetting that women who get abortions are usually mothers and already have done their Darwinian duty. Those who aren't already mothers will have children in the future.)

In "Nature," infanticide is far from unknown. And this may be a good time to quote again an excerpt from Marlene Zuk's Sexual Selections (California, 2002) about the results of forced copulation among zebra finches:

These matings never resulted in any offspring, which is interesting by itself. Even more interesting, though, was that 28 percent of chicks in the aviaries were from the remaining 20 percent of EPCs that were not forced, an astounding success rate. What were the females doing to influence the fate of sperm from different males? No one knows. The cloaca of female birds is clearly capable of some sophisticated maneuvering; in several species, females have been observed ejecting sperm after a copulation. The organ’s structure and function has, however, been relatively little studied by scientists [84-5]

Females in any species are not obligated by evolution or nature to accept insemination, carry offspring to term, or allow their offspring to survive infancy. Their refusal to do any of these things is part of the "evolutionary imperative," not defiance of it.

Defending the Indefensible

I knew there was something else I meant to write about here, but it kept slipping my mind.

I've always liked Doonesbury, though since I don't regularly read newspapers there have been prolonged periods when I didn't follow the strip closely. For a few years in the 1980s I would just buy each collection as it was published. Now that it's available online, I've done a little better. It was fun to watch certain right-wingers fume when he started up some plots about the Iraq War, with very sympathetic and intelligent portrayals of the troops. When longtime character B.D. lost a leg and his football helmet, a lot of people took notice, but Trudeau has also given serious story time to Leo aka Toggle, an Iraq vet who returns to college after his medical discharge, where he becomes romantically involved with Mike Doonesbury's daughter Alex. Leo lost an eye and has trouble speaking due to Traumatic Brain Injury; he's also a heavy-metal fan who drives a pickup truck. Not exactly the kind of character the Right (or many liberals, alas) would expect to get sensitive kind of treatment in Doonesbury. Which only goes to show how little they know. Sure, Trudeau is a liberal, but he's the kind of liberal that gives liberals a good name.

In last Sunday's strip, Alex and Leo go out for coffee. Alex makes some slighting remarks about some men carrying guns, "open-carry yahoos" as she calls them. (Do such men regularly kick back at Starbucks?) Leo intervenes in the argument: "Listen, dude," he tells one of the men, "I spent two years behind an M60 machine gun defending, among other things, your right to be a moron about guns!" Alex exclaims in delight over Leo's unexpectedly getting out a full sentence.

It's a cute little story, but one thing jumped out at me. Leo was not defending freedom in Iraq. No Iraqi was a threat to Americans' right to be morons about guns. No Iraqi was a threat to American rights or freedoms. It was, and is, our government that is the biggest threat to American rights or freedoms -- remember the Patriot Act, which was passed under Bush but was originally a Clinton-era project? -- and it was in the service of that government that Leo and thousands of other soldiers went to Iraq.

I know, I know, what he said was in character. For that matter, the latest Doonesbury collection, Signature Wound, has a Foreword by retired US Marine Corps General and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace, who hails "all who have stepped forward and volunteered to protect the freedoms we hold dear." Such talk is a conditioned reflex, not only in the military but among most people who can't quite bring themselves to object to any war the US starts. I must respectfully but firmly differ with the General, and with Leo, and with Garry Trudeau if it comes to that. The United States has not fought a defensive war in my lifetime, and I was born in 1951. With all proper sympathy and empathy for those who feel the need to rationalize and justify their participation in the wars of aggression we have fought and are fighting now, I can't go along with them on this point. As far as I can see, until Americans can recognize what their government and their armed forces are doing, we will continue to get involved in these wars, and that will mean more young people getting chewed up and spat out by the military, with more or less support from their society. (Not to mention the vastly greater numbers of innocent foreigners who suffer.) But the best way -- the only way, really -- to support them is not to damage them in the first place.

P.S. May 9, 2010: Oh, dear, here's another one. (Via)

I am a homosexual American citizen and while I fight to defend the rights of free speech and a democratic legislature process, I suffer because these very same freedoms are denied to me as a gay Sailor.

Again, this is mere rhetoric (read the whole letter for his account of the highlights of his service). Which, as I've said before, doesn't mean the ban on gays in the military shouldn't be lifted, only that it has nothing to do with defending anyone's rights.

P.P.S. May 16, 2010: This one from the Give a Damn Campaign's website, an open letter to President Obama from a gay soldier on leave from deployment in Iraq:

When serving in a war zone, you learn quite a bit about yourself and what’s important to you. I’ve had the chance to work on a close and personal level with the people of Iraq, and in doing so, I have realized more than ever that the freedoms we enjoy as Americans should not be taken for granted – we must protect them at all costs. These freedoms are essential to the very foundation of our society. Yet so many men and women who fight for these freedoms aren’t allotted their own. Our freedom to love and be loved by whomever we choose. The freedom to live of a life of truth and dignity.

I wonder if it's possible to talk about an issue like this without relying on such pious garbage. But this young man isn't protecting my freedoms, or your freedoms, or anyone else's freedoms. If anything, he's fighting for a state that is dedicated to taking freedom away. (In an exchange on the Campaign's Facebook pages, one guy inadvertently came closer to reality: "I'm gay, and I would love to serve my military..." (But then I noticed that "Serving the Military" is the thread topic; I can't even give this poor kid credit for the Freudian slip.)