Sir, This Is Blogger

A thought: If you really had a medical condition that made it unsafe for you to wear a mask, would you want to fight your way into a store crowded with unmasked people sneezing, coughing, talking, yelling virus-laced droplets into the air? This is why I think most of the people who claim such conditions in order to get out of wearing a mask are lying.  It's also why I am always skeptical when people talk about "common sense," since so many opponents of masks or of any effective measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 invoke it.  But maybe I'm missing something, feel free to fill me in.

Earlier this year I saw a meme to the effect of "If Walmart is safe, why aren't churches considered safe"? WALMART WASN'T SAFE, nor were other stores - they were needed, which is why people were urged to wear masks at the time, to go in and get out as quickly as possible, and not to enter if they were sick. But I realize that just yelling 'WHY CAN'T I DO WHATEVER I WANT" doesn't sound as good.

I can understand that wearing a mask makes some people anxious, fearful of being asphyxiated. It's beyond their control, and I sympathize with them. So do businesses, and the government. That's why curbside pickup and home delivery were ramped up, so you can get your necessities without having to wear a mask. It's also why I believe most people who make the claim are lying.

But, you know, you're entitled to lie: lying is protected speech, believe it or not. Other people, however, are entitled to disagree with you, mock you, and yell at you when you harass store employees who have to make you wear a mask or leave.

Side note to all any edgy, rad people who may read this: notice that it doesn't contain the word "fuck" even once. Now, I love that word, but using it doesn't make an argument any stronger. In fact, it's the edgy, elderly-rockstar equivalent of "wearing a mask violates my freedom!!!"

Thank you for reading my TED talk.

Born Free

I stumbled on a video clip from the Jimmy Fallon Show, featuring a couple of comedy characters invented and played by Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon.  It took me a few minutes to figure out exactly what was going on, but eventually I did.  (Here's an explanation for those who, like me, are not up to the minute on pop culture.)

At one point Ferrell's character announces emphatically that he's "single by choice," though he respects "a woman's choice not to want to go out with me."  Of course what he meant was that he's not single because no one wants him, it's his decision.  But what immediately occurred to me was that he, and I, and everybody except for conjoined twins, is born single.  Being in a couple is a lifestyle choice, being single is in our DNA.

Yes, I know, this was comedy, but I'm not analyzing Ferrell's character's claim as a philosophical position.  I'm interested in it as it refers to a popular motif.  One of many reasons why the whole "born this way" shtick annoys me is that it blurs distinctions that matter.  What, for example, does it mean to be "born gay"?  What proponents generally mean is "conceived gay," which is why they are still hunting the ever-elusive Gay Gene.  Or the Gay Epigene.

It's seldom stated baldly, but in many cultures, including the US until fairly recently, marriage has been not so much a choice as a duty.  Some might shirk it, and the call to celibacy could be a useful lever in doing so, but you had to have a damn good excuse: if not divine appointment then having lost one's testicles in the war or having had a hysterectomy.  Matrimony was just natural, you know? (Some of today's Christians are trying to claim that having a homosexual temperament constitutes a call to celibacy, much as Roman Catholics might find that an inconveniently unruly woman had such a call and so could be forced into a convent.)  Remember, the whole point of social construction theory is that what is called "natural," built into the structure of humanity if not of the universe, is in fact the result of human will and decisions.

Back in the old days, dating to the early days of the Modern Homosexual but still when I was scouring libraries for information about homosexuality in the 60s and 70s, the medical profession often distinguished between "situational" homosexuality and "obligatory" (I think that was the term) homosexuality.  "Situational" meant prison and other homosocial environments, where the other sex was unavailable by policy or stereotype.  The assumption was that once the inmates had access, they would revert to heterosexuality (though this was not always true).  "Obligatory" meant that because of inborn temperament or perverted upbringing, a person was uninterested in the other sex even when it was available, and so had to be an invert.  But this, it seems to me, is what "choice" actually means: I have access to members of the other sex, but I choose members of my own.  I could put it in Christian terms: like those who are "called" to celibacy, I am called to be queer, and single.  But that also means that I choose them.  People make all kinds of choices for all kinds of reason, and we are usually not required to explain why unless someone wants us to make others.  Rather than justify ourselves, we should make them justify themselves.

People who are bent on splitting themselves in half will continue to insist that their sexual desires and behavior are imposed on them, externally by Nature or internally by Gay Gene.  The reasoning resembles the endless regress of some of the the traditional arguments for the existence of God: everything has to have a cause, and when you get to the first cause it's either God or if you're a scientist, the genes.  (The biologist Susan Oyama has shown how genetic determinists have largely secularized the First Cause by assigning it to biology. That doesn't make it a valid argument.)  Maybe everything does have a cause, but we don't always know what it is, and maybe we never will.  Maybe the craving to assign causes is one of those limits of the human brain/mind, an itch that some people feel compelled to scratch unceasingly.  But not everyone does, and there's no reason why we should have to.

Overlooking the Obvious Again

One thing I've learned over the years from speaking to classes and from online discussion is that very often a question has an unspoken assumption I don't hear at first.  Discovering such an assumption may drastically change the way I answer the question.

Once, for example, a young woman told us that an older male relative, maybe a policeman, had referred to "gay rape" in her presence.  This upset her a great deal, and the other panelists tried to answer it without succeeding in assuaging her concern.  Finally we figured out that she had concluded that her relative meant that rape was a normal part of the gay male experience.  I explained to her that he must have been talking about the rape of a male by another male, which he called "gay rape" just as many people refer to marriage between two men or two women as "gay marriage."  When she understood that gay men don't usually rape each other, she was visibly relieved.  Years later, I'm still baffled at how anyone could have drawn such a conclusion, but that was a learning experience in itself.

I just finished reading I Am Your Sister, the posthumous collection of Audre Lorde's nonfiction writings I wrote about yesterday, and I came again on the notion that, as one Third World queer writer phrased it, concern about women or non-heterosexuals is a "luxury," a monkey wrench thrown into the struggle for liberation.  Or, as a young African-American man asked Audre Lorde in Germany in the 1980s, "Would you think that the Black women's liberation struggle causes harm to the overall struggle for Black freedom?"  (The notable thing about Lorde's answer, which can be heard in Dagmar Schultz' documentary Audre Lorde -- The Berlin Years 1984-1992, is the way she changes her spoken delivery.  Her voice goes up about an octave, sounding almost girlish.  I presume that she did so in an attempt to make her forthright answer less threatening to her male interlocutor.  I'm not sure it worked.)

Of course, this notion assumes that liberation is for men only.  Lorde tells a chilling anecdote in I Am Your Sister:

In 1985 I had a dialogue with James Baldwin at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, not far from Boston.  One of the most heated discussions was around the issue of the twelve murdered Black women, and sexual violence and assault against Black women in general within our Black communities.  There were present two other Black women, two other Black men, one white man, and a young Black male student.

Jimmy and one of the older Black men were in agreement that under the tremendous pressures of racism, Black men could not be held responsible for their violence against Black women, since it was a response to an unjust system, and Black women were only incidental victims.  One of the Black men went so far as to say:

"The Black male is not attacking the Black female; it would be a sheep if that's what was there ..."  To this I replied, and still reply:

"Yes, but I'm not a sheep, I'm your sister ... who is learning to use a gun.  If we wind up having to kill each other instead of our enemies, what a terrible waste for us all."

And at this point it was the young Black male student in the room who spoke up to the older men, in defense of his mother and sisters and their right to defend themselves in the street [179].

It suddenly occurred to me that people who raise this objection are thinking in terms of struggle against the First World oppressor, and assume that women's and gay concerns are going to be added to the list of demands that the liberation movement makes of the oppressor.  But the real issue is internal to the struggle for liberation: Third World men must stop oppressing Third World women and other Third World men.  It's not surprising that such men should object to this condition: they have generally absorbed First World sexism and and anti-gay bigotry along with First World political theories like Marxism and psychoanalysis, using these principles to reinforce indigenous inequities.  Still, it is easier for Third World men to stop oppressing other members of their own group than to demand that the First World stop doing so. (Do I need to add that this applies just as much to sexism and racism among gay white Americans?)  All they need to do is stop harming their own people; this will add nothing to the burden of their struggle against the West.  As Lorde told a mostly white female German audience in The Berlin Years, "Each one of you sitting here has some power.  I know that makes you uncomfortable enough to laugh, but you are responsible for using that power, whatever it is.  And that is not altruism, that is survival."

Okay, Let's Go!

As I walking home this afternoon from the public library, reading as I went, I became aware of movement on my left. I glanced up from my book and saw a man getting into the passenger side of an old van parked there (somewhere between a panel truck and an SUV, actually). He said cheerfully, "Okay -- let's go!" I looked again and saw a very little kid, two or three years old, sitting on the driver's side with his hands on the wheel and grinning joyously at his dad. (The father, in his late twenties, unshaven, dressed in work clothes, reminded me of my own father, fifty years ago and more.) I remembered that feeling well, even though it's more than half a century behind me now: laying my hands on grownups' things, their instruments of power, the magical monsters they controlled so casually and easily. For just a second I could believe that someday I'd be big enough to do it myself.

It's the reverse of what Laura Miller wrote about in The Magician's Book (Little, Brown, 2008), her wonderful meditation on fantasy and reading:

Animals seemed like relatives left behind in the Old Country, except that the growing expanse that separated us wasn’t a physical ocean but a cognitive one. They stood on the dock, getting ever smaller, while we children watched from the deck, on the way to a new, supposedly better way of being in the world, haunted by the image of what we were losing.

Animals, like infants, belong to the vast nation of those who communicate without words, through gesture, expression, scent, sound, and touch. Children are immigrants from that nation and, like most recent immigrants, still have a mental foothold on the abandoned shore. I believed, probably correctly, that I understood animals better and cared for them more than the adults around me. I could still faintly remember what it was like to be a beast, before language complicated things. But I didn’t appreciate the inverse relationship between the individual self I was building out of the new words I acquired every day and the inarticulate world that moved away from me as my identity gained definition [28].

It's not just through machines, of course, that grownups show their power and freedom. On the most basic level, there's freedom of movement. Almost every day I see (and hear) some little kid in the public library fighting with a parent, not wanting to leave yet (or maybe wanting to leave already, but I don't think that would produce as much screaming indignation). They see grownups walking to and fro, just as they please, not asking anyone for permission. They cross the street just like that! (On the other hand, as Miller points out, "being able to navigate traffic on your own doesn’t keep you from wanting to hold somebody’s hand once in a while, if for different reasons" [34].) I don't blame the parents, naturally, but I don't blame the children either.

Being allowed to play Driver, being allowed to be Daddy or Mommy for a moment, is a taste and a promise of the power and the freedom that will come. Children don't realize -- how could they? -- that adults don't enjoy perfect freedom and power. But sometimes I think that we forget how much we do have. Little scenes like the one I just saw remind me.