No Matter Who Is President of the US, They Would Bomb Afghanistan

The libertarian blogger Will Wilkinson's latest post is on Iran, mostly drawing on an article by an Iranian exile, Lila Ghobady. Wilkinson allows that he doesn't know much about Iran, and so defers to Ghobady. That's a good idea, but unfortunately Ghobady doesn't know much about countries outside of Iran. Like these United States.

One commenter beat me to pointing out that Ghobady didn't go far enough when she declared that "Iran has not had a democratic, free election for the past 30 years." The reality is that Iran hasn't had a democratic, free election for the past 55 years, since 1953. The extra quarter century of repression is courtesy of the United States and Britain, which objected to the free, democratic election of Mohammad Mossedegh and sponsored a coup, followed by the accession of the Shah Rezi Pahlevi. The Shah ruled Iran harshly, with murder and torture, until he was finally overthrown in 1979.

Ghobady also wrote, correctly, that

There has been no real election. Candidates are all hand-picked and cleared by a central religious committee. It is a farcical imitation of the free nomination/ election process that we have pictured in the free world. There is no possibility that a secular, pluralistic, freedom-loving democratic person who loves his or her country can become a candidate to run for president (or any other office) in Iran.

True enough. But by these criteria, there hasn't been a free election in the US for a long time either. (Notice that in his day, the Shah's regime was numbered among those of the free world, along with many other brutal but non-Communist dictatorships.) Candidates for the Presidency of the US must pass muster by corporate elites and their allies in the two major parties, and a pro-corporate press genuflecting to a narrow caricature of religion, which effectively rules out the possibility of a secular, pluralistic, freedom-loving democratic person becoming a candidate for president, or any other major office, in the United States. When the Republicans stole the 2000 election, they bused in thugs to intimidate the vote counters in Florida, with no response from the Democrats and no popular response in the streets. But then, mass dissent in the US is reviled, penned in, and subject to state violence no less than in Iran -- I have the right to say such things as an individual, but getting together with others would subject us all to surveillance and eventual repression.

That doesn't mean things aren't worse in Iran, only that the posturing of the US media and some media figures is tiresome in its hypocrisy. The saddest part is that many of the protesters in Iran may have believed that the "free world" was watching their struggle, when our leaders were only interested in what political hay they could make of it.

Poetry Friday -- How can I call you beautiful?

How can I call you beautiful? In any
bar you entered you would turn no heads
but mine -- you are no ikon for the many
to carry off and kneel to in their beds.
Nor do I think: "But dress him properly,
find him a better barber -- yes, and please,
shave off that awful mustache!" No. To me
you're fine in tennis shoes and dungarees.
Oh, if I wanted Class (Class only in
the vulgar sense), I know the marketplace
where it's on sale: Take home a mannequin,
a perfect body and an empty face.
Let other people queue up for what sells
most dearly. I want you. And no one else.

April 19, 1978

Chocolate Rations Raised Again!

Okay, let's see, where was I? Oh, yeah: President Obama has severely disappointed many of his gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer supporters by by permitting the Department of Justice to issue a brief defending the Defense of Marriage Act, and then committing damage control with a derisory executive memo offering minimal benefits to same-sex partners of Civil Service Workers. Cue the reaction shot:


Now some of the mainstream GLBT organizations are fighting back, not only by de-friending the President on Facebook but by aiming at any politician's most vulnerable spot, his fundraising: "a steady stream of usually dependable Democratic stalwarts dropped out of a normally prestigious and well-attended LGBT DNC fund-raiser being hosted by Vice President Joe Biden on June 25 -- David Mixner, blogger Andy Towle, the Human Rights Campaign's Marty Rouse, former Clinton adviser Richard Socarides, millionaire Bruce Bastian, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders attorney Mary Bonauto, and the National Stonewall Democrats, to name a few," Kelly Eleveld reported at the Advocate website. Such a daring move, though some other high-profile homos are going to attend anyway. (P.S. June 26: And it didn't keep the DNC from raising even more money at that dinner than last year.) How long they'll be able to hold out before they rush back under the safety of his wings, I don't know.

The more discussion I've seen on this dust-up, the less I'm inclined to support same-sex marriage. I don't support mixed-sex marriage either, after all. Far from being a matter of equality, as the advocates of same-sex marriage keep saying, marriage is a matter of inequality: inequality between the spouses, and inequality between married couples and other family arrangements -- or between married couples and single persons. One commenter at Alison Bechdel's blog, for example, complained that she and her English partner cannot be together because of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevents them from being "married in the eyes of the federal government and therefore she has no immigration rights." As the writer said, this is "heartbreaking," but why should someone have to get married to get "immigration rights"? (She didn't explain why she doesn't move to England, where she could marry her partner.) In his book The sexuality of migration: border crossings and Mexican immigrant men (NYU Press, 2009), the scholar Lionel Cantú, Jr. quoted a representative of a gay organization working on immigration issues that changed its focus from "just talking about immigration categories being too restricted because they didn’t recognize different kinds of families." When marriage became a hot issue, he said, "what we were trying to push for was opening it up" (66). By stressing just one kind of family, albeit the most prestigious kind, I'd say they were pushing to close it down. Besides, marriage doesn't automatically, naturally, magically solve the problem of immigration. In the early years of the 20th century, American women could lose their American citizenship if they married a foreign (especially non-white) man. Not until 1936 was this changed.

Why should someone have to get married to get a pension, or health insurance? Why should someone have to get married to visit a sick person in the hospital? On the subject of children, Nancy Polikoff has written in Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon, 2008),

It’s especially troubling when marriage-equality advocates make similar assertions [to those of the religious marriage movement]. The constitutional mandate and law reform of efforts of the late 1960s and 1970s reflected the understanding that children are not supposed to suffer harm as a result of having unmarried parents. The lifelong disabilities of “illegitimacy” have been erased. If a law discriminates between a child born to married parents and a child born to unmarried parents, it is subject to heightened scrutiny under the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

… Some who urge marriage as the solution to children’s needs fail to distinguish between consequences of marriage and consequences of parenthood. For example, a National Gay and Lesbian Task Force publication refers to the lack of educational assistance for the children of deceased public safety officers “who lack legal recognition of the parent-child relationship due to the lack of marriage rights of their parents.” But a child does not need his parents to be married to get these rights; the child needs his parent to be legally recognized as his parent. The same is true for children of heterosexual parents.... [100-101]

Marriage-equality supporters also invoke the specter of illegitimacy and quote marriage-movement rhetoric about child well-being. The American Psychological Association, in its briefs in same-sex marriage cases, has argued that children of gay and lesbian couples will benefit from their parents’ marriage because nonmarital birth is widely viewed as undesirable. Referring to the historical stigma of “illegitimacy” and “bastardy”, it argues that “this stigma … will not be visited upon the children of same-sex couples when those couples can legally marry.”

… Herdt and Kertzner assert that “marriage denial has had particular effects on the well-being of children reared by lesbians and gay men by undermining family stability and perpetuating false claims about parental fitness.” But the research on children of gay parents uniformly finds no damage to them. The claims for marriage equality made for the sake of the children unfortunately echo claims the marriage movement makes when it blames poor child outcomes on parents’ failure to marry.

Evan Wolfson, of Freedom to Marry, wrote that “all children deserve to know that their family is worthy of respect in the eyes of the law. … That respect come[s] with the freedom to marry.” I agree with Wolfson’s premise but not his conclusion; the respect comes from the law equally valuing all family forms ... [102-103].

Some might argue that once same-sex marriage gets legal recognition, these little problems can be dealt with, and all other family forms will also be valued. I doubt it. Even granting the best intentions to the advocates of marriage, I would expect them to want a rest, in terms of time and energy as well as money, from such political activism. And I'm not inclined to take their goodwill for granted. As Polikoff shows, they are too willing to buy into the marriage-supremacist rhetoric of the religious Right where the well-being of children is concerned. Suppose that same-sex marriage were legalized in every state and at the federal level. What would happen to a couple from different countries who want to be together, but don't want to marry? From what I've seen, I don't believe they'd get much sympathy from the gay marriage movement. Why wouldn't they want to marry? Why are they so selfish and immature and ungrateful? Why not exercise the rights they've been granted, thanks to the hard work of dedicated activists over many years?

I believe the appeal of marriage as a solution to so many problems is due to inequality -- the prestige of marriage over other kinds of family bonds. That's not something I am inclined to support or encourage. While Obama's waffling doesn't make him look any better to me, he couldn't fix that by reversing course and putting a full effort into advancing the recognition of same-sex marriage in the US. There's too much else wrong with him.

Dissatisfaction

Even though he links to Andrew Sullivan way too much, I like Homo Superior Curates the Web. He puts together a nice mix of images and links, useful and entertaining. Among the images and links are sexy pictures of nekkid men, which are pleasant, but are generally -- all right, nearly always -- typical of what I see on gay male sites: twentyish youths, lean and lightly muscled, pretty, all within a very narrow range of variation; usually white, but even the non-white ones are products of the same mould. I enjoy looking at them, but pretty soon I start wondering why they all look so much alike.

It reminds me of a passage in Marge Piercy's novel Small Changes (Doubleday, 1973), where the character Beth, hiding out in a friend's apartment from her estranged husband until she can divorce him, picks up

some magazines from the coffee table and began leafing through.

They were not exactly like the magazines she'd read in high school. There was more about sex and more about food. The girls' magazines assumed you went to school with lots of boys you had to attract and know how to handle ("How to Say No without Losing Him"). These magazines assumed you had to go out and find men and spouted suggestions for joining activities where They would be sure to be found. They also seemed to assume that you went to bed. ...

There were articles about getting back in circulation after divorce, about making more glamorous dinners than you could afford, about sewing clothes that would look more expensive than you could afford, about buying lots and lots more clothes in new styles, about meeting men at the office, about how roommates could spend their entire joint salary for month giving a New Year's Eve party, and ten articles on beauty. If she followed the directions in even one or two of them, the upkeep on her body would consume her entire free existence.

There were many stories in which women got men in various ways or lost them. The stories were sexier than those she had used to read. The effect of reading them was to feel discontented and sad and vaguely stirred up, as if something were wrong with her.... [315-16]

This describes most gay male magazines nowadays, and the commercial gay websites, which is why they're of limited use to people like me. But it also describes what I feel looking at the photos featured on Homo Superior and the sites they come from: discontented and sad and vaguely stirred up. Which is why I don't look at them much.

So this entry, "The Need for Natural," at HomoSuperior took me by surprise:

The endless stream of zero-body fat model-boys on queer tumblr (At least most of them have retained their natural body-hair…) really numbs my mind after awhile.

Doesn’t anybody like boys/men with a little heft? And who don’t get paid for looking good?

You do realize that’s the reason they look good, right? Um, you do, don’t you?

Oh, I do realize it, I do. But if he feels that way, why do almost all the guys in the pictures on Homo Superior Curates the Web (including most of a page of images from teen-bodybuilding.com) fit exactly that description: zero body-fat model-boys? Even when he links to Real Men of New York, the photo he chooses to accompany the link is of a tattooed guy who doesn't have much more than zero body fat. Which might be a come-on to get his readers to click on the link and have their horizons widened, because most of the men pictured at Real Men of New York are not model-boys. Some are muscular, some are young, but some are older, even old, and some are not In Shape by any criterion, and they come in a variety of colors and types. They're real men, not in the sense of men who've passed the National Machismo Standards Test, but in the sense of actual men rather than fantasy men. "Natural" has nothing to do with it, of course; a lot of these bodies are the products of dedicated gym work, and the outfits are no more "natural" in their calculatedness than a body waxing.

I've written about this syndrome before, in one of the first posts on this blog.

Lamenting gay men's shallow obsession with looks is always good for livening up a slow session in a chat room or for taking a break while guy-watching at the bar. Of course, the complaint is almost always about other gay men's shallowness. I can't recall ever having heard someone moan, "I'm so shallow -- all I care about is looks. Personality doesn't matter to me at all." ...

Let me try to make this as clear as possible: I am not telling gay men (or anyone else) to have sex with people they're not attracted to. I am not arguing that gay men should change their sexual tastes, trying through sheer will-power to crave non-buff non-hunks; if anything, it's most critics of gay male looksism who talk as if they believed that. (Close your eyes, think of England and fuck his personality. It's an odd notion to encounter in individuals who believe that we are born with our sexual desires genetically programmed into us, and that they are absolutely impossible to change.) I'm not even saying that my taste in men is superior to that of most gay men. What I am saying is that our tastes are already broader than we admit.

So, if you like boys/men with a little heft, why not post more pictures of them to your blog, along with all the model-boys, if only for some variety? It isn't only men who are paid to look good who look good.





(Images from The Real Men of New York, via HomoSuperior.)

Poetry Friday -- Gracehoper

Gracehoper

Poor little ant, you work so hard and save
so much. So practical, constructing mounds
of earth and stones and food and wealth; so brave
in most things, coward where it really counts.
And I the grasshopper -- you wouldn't take
me home to show to Mother, I who squander
all that Nature gave me. What I make
I toss away, I seem content to wander
on the earth you make your home beneath.
I am boat-rocker, dancer, and nose-thumber.
You'll have shelter from the winter's teeth,
while I can flourish only while it's summer.
Yet I often think that by your grace
I might find summer always in one place.

[early 1979]

Thanks to President Obama for Increasing Our Chocolate Ration

I'm not doing the "I Told You So" dance, exactly, nor am I feeling much Schadenfreude. I am feeling some grim satisfaction that gay and pro-gay Obama fans are finally experiencing a crisis of faith. It took them long enough!

The occasion of their discomfiture is twofold: the first was the Department of Justice's decision to defend the Defense of Marriage Act against a court challenge, put in terms that seem almost calculated to incense nice liberals. (Omighod! they totally compare us to child molesters!) The second was Obama's announcement that he was tossing a few crumbs to US Civil Service employees with same-sex partners. Maybe because it came so quickly after the first provocation, many of Obama's former defenders are actually skeptical (via) of their Messiah this time. And rightly so: Obama has not issued an executive order, but a non-binding memo; the benefits being extended may not even be new; the benefits are limited by the provisions of the same Defense of Marriage Act that Obama's DOJ is defending. Why, it's as if he doesn't care about us! It's as if this is just an empty public relations move!

Some of the faithful have not fallen away, of course: he hasn't had time yet, or he's playing eleven-dimensional chess with the Republicans, but in the end we will see that he really, really was on our side all along. The difference between them and those who are now mad as hell is mainly a matter of degree, though. The latter were able to overlook Obama's overtures to antigay Christians via Donnie McClurkin, his faith-based (and therefore irrelevant) opposition to same-sex marriage, and his buddying up with Rick Warren. More seriously to my mind, they were able to make the same excuses when Obama appointed a staff made up mainly of Reagan Democrats and Bush holdovers; when he continued the Bush-Paulson bailout of the financial industry (but then, he'd been part of it all along); when he played a shell game with US prisoners at Guantanamo; when he protected American war criminals and torturers from even the threat of prosecution; when he extended the blockade of Cuba, kept silent during the Israeli assault on Gaza, and escalated the US war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing many innocent people. Through all of this Obama's fans lightly dismissed his critics: give him time, he's got a plan, he needs our support not our criticism. On the one hand I welcome them to the fold of naysayers on Mount Disdain; on the other, I notice that they only got upset when their own ox was being gored.

More on this later ... I'm in Incheon Airport, waiting for my flight back to the US.

(P.S. -- I'd have preferred the "Will and Grace" version, but you work with the "I Told You So" dance you have. Or the one that's available on YouTube, anyway.)

Hellspawn of Dude, I'm a Fag

Aside from getting ready to return to the US on Friday, I've been writing comments on other people's blogs instead of writing posts for my own. It's occurred to me that some of those comments could, with a little more work, be adapted and posted here. In particular the one that underlies what I'm writing now, in which I was struggling to articulate what I meant. I'll try again here.

So, from here I went to here, which made me go Huh. I thought I'd look to see what else the blogger had written, and found this. Some people are now up in arms about the phrase, "Just sayin'." According to Virtual Lee, the phrase is "most often used at the end of a rant or at the end of suggestion ameliorating a hot pitch with a shrug and an I don’t care." That's not how I recall having seen it used, or having used it myself. Gawker wants it banned, which seems to me like a good reason to keep using it. The writer at Gawker signed off with:

If you didn’t mean what you said or if there was no import to it, don’t say it. Why say it? Don’t say it. But worse than that, you obviously did mean what you said so don’t veil it with pretending you didn’t. Last month was the R-Word Month, during which the public was meant to avoid saying “retard” as an insult. Let’s make this the month of not saying Just Sayin’. It’s dumb and retarded. Just sayin’.

Lee, I think, missed what the Gawker writer meant to do. According to both of them, "Just sayin'" is like adding "Not!" to the end of a possibly incendiary sentence, or "No Homo", or pretending that you didn't mean a slur or other insult, you were just joking, geez, don't be so PC, chill out! "Dumb and retarded" was, I thought, intended to be an example of what the writer meant, since he had already established that calling someone or something "retarded" is a no-no. But Lee huffed,

... ‘Just sayin” is certainly not as hurtfull [sic] as accusing someone of having a specific neurological illness. Easy to ban, not so easy to dscern [sic]. Just sayin’

The word "accusing" struck me strange. Maybe calling someone a retard is an accusation, but it doesn't make much sense as one. Having a low IQ is not a moral, let alone a criminal failing; it's nonvoluntary. (And Down Syndrome, which I think is what most people associate with mental retardation nowadays, is a chromosomological disorder, not really a neurological one. I'm just sayin'.) The same goes for a lot of slurs. Naomi Klein reminded Barack Obama during last year's election campaign that "being called a Muslim is not a smear"; treating it as if it were only surrenders to the attacker. Being called gay, or even queer, is not an accusation, though many gay people inexplicably act as if it were. (Oh, not inexplicably -- it's because they agree that being gay is bad, only We Can't Help It, It's In Our Genes.) Refusing to use the smarts Nature gave you, however, arguably is a moral failing, and calling someone a retard is a good example of same.

I suppose that the people who throw around insults like "retard" mostly know that their targets aren't retarded, just as they know that the people they call "faggots" aren't gay. Which doesn't mean that they wouldn't pick on real retarded or gay people, of course; they probably would. They know it's not an accusation; rather it's a taunt, thrown to see if it will draw blood. That's why kids call each other "fag," "queer," "dumb," "fat," "girl," to see if the target will flinch. But I'm not being fair to kids there, since so many adults never outgrow this practice. The right 'accuses' Michael Moore of being fat; the left and the near right 'accuse' Rush Limbaugh of being fat. It would be one thing if such childishness were a way of letting off steam before moving on to more substantive matters, but in many cases it's all they know how to do. (As shown by the popular jape: "Arguing on the Internet is like entering the Special Olympics -- even if you win, your [sic -- they always write it this way] still retarded." In other words, they don't know how to debate or argue or think, which are done pretty much the same on the Internet as elsewhere, and they think their incapacity makes them superior. Superior to whom? To just about everybody, from their tone.

In our national political discourse, it matters a lot more how much you weigh, how you dress, your accent, your hairstyle, the "message" you're sending, than what you believe or do, and why. It matters more that you be "responsible," "positive," and "civil" than that you have any idea what you're talking about. Liberals dwelt much more on Dubya's inability to pronounce "nuclear" than on his real crimes, and now they're much more interested in Obama's comparative eloquence, his poise, how good he is with children (American ones, that is -- what he's done to Afghan and Pakistani children is not to be mentioned), what a great couple he and Michelle are, than in his policies and actions.

I suppose the same reason underlies the panic so many adults exhibit when someone throws a slur in their direction -- they've never outgrown the panic children feel when a gang of other kids call them names. Mommy! they're being mean to me! Still, we need to outgrow it. It's so much easier to try to ban words we don't like than to get people to change their ideas and feelings. (I bet the Gawker's R-Word Month made a big difference, don't you?)

Once, when I was about twelve, I fell off my bike, scraping my knee and hand. It was the first time I'd done that in a long time. I reflexively drew in a breath to start crying, which is what you're supposed to do when you fall and hurt yourself, but then stopped when I realized that though the scrapes hurt, they didn't hurt that much. After pondering this for a moment, I got back on the bike and rode on. I've had much the same reaction to some of the slurs and insults that were directed at me as an adult: they don't hurt that much, not enough to keep me from riding figuratively on -- and when possible, all over the person who used the slur. If I've left tire marks on their souls, then my life has not been entirely in vain.