The Best Catch There Is

 “There must have been a reason,” Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. “They couldn’t just barge in here and chase everyone out.”

“No reason,” wailed the old woman. “No reason.”

“What right did they have?”

“Catch-22.”

“What?” Yossarian froze in his tracks with fear and alarm and felt his whole body begin to tingle. “What did you say?”

“Catch-22” the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down. “Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”

I dragged my feet on this post for several days -- weeks by now -- and then events upended some details, but the main point is unchanged.

I've found it difficult to write about US politics this year because 2024 shook so many of my beliefs and assumptions about politics.  Much of what I hear or read involves "what we can expect," what could or might potentially happen, and the predictions of experts of all backgrounds have proven spectacularly wrong.  Will Trump's economic adventuring and corruption bring about a recession?  Inflation?  Experts are happy to weigh in for the news media, but who in their right mind would trust them?  Even though our corporate overlords were proved hilariously wrong when they assured us that there would be a big-time recession in 2023, they still appear and are quoted breathlessly.  After all, eventually they'll be right.

The excerpt above from Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 has always haunted me. The thugs who invoked Catch-22 weren't Nazis but American military police.  It should never be forgotten that the US not only has a long history of authoritarian violence, we wrote the book.  There's a sizable portion of the American populace, not limited to MAGA, that approves of and indeed revels in police violence: shock raids, beatings, extra-judicial killings, disappearances.  I wonder how many of Trump's critics today remember George W. Bush's illegal rendition of prisoners to black sites for "enhanced interrogation"?  That's a euphemism that makes authoritarians across the political spectrum moan with sensual pleasure.  But all these practices fit into a larger context that Vincent Bevins discussed in his book The Jakarta Method, showing how the vast 1965 massacres in Indonesia provided a blueprint for US-backed atrocities around the world ever since.  I read it before the 2024 elections, and it troubled my sleep; still does.  It's not only about suppression of the left; dictators usually turn on their own side as they consolidate power.

What disturbed me about Trump's campaign against foreigners in the US was the way he, his spokespeople, and his supporters all assumed not only that every immigrant (undocumented or not) is a criminal but that if someone is a criminal the government can do to them whatever it likes, without due process or any limits at all.  It's Catch-22: they have a right to do whatever we can't stop them from doing.  By "criminal" they mean any infringement of the law whatsoever, real or imaginary: parking tickets, speeding tickets, outstaying their visas, crossing the border without asking "Uncle Sam, may I?" Someone who let a parking meter run out is no different from a rapist or murderer, and is at Trump's nonexistent mercy.  Never mind that Trump himself is a convicted felon, or that he has pardoned hundreds of violent convicted criminals.  (Or that his predecessors are all war criminals - but that's even less important.)

While cruelty pleases MAGA especially, liberals aren't immune to its pleasures either: the idea of punching Republicans, beating up Nazis, putting capitalists to the guillotine, starving hillbillies, etc. also turns on many liberals.  The political scientist Corey Robin recently wrote against the claim that "the cruelty is the point":

One of the claims you often heard during Trump 1.0, which I always thought was misleading, was that “the cruelty is the point.” If you know anything about the history of political intimidation and politically repressive fear, you know that the cruelty is not the point. Silence, obedience, and submission—subjugation for political ends—that’s the point. The goal of McCarthyism was to crush what was left of the New Deal left-liberal alliance, primarily in the labor movement, and it succeeded. The point wasn’t to be cruel.

Trump and some of his allies really are just sadists, psychopaths, and sociopaths. There is no doubt about that. But political intimidation and political repression does have a political goal beyond generic “cruelty.”

I see his point, and I think it should be borne in mind, but I also think it's a quibble that could be a distraction.  I think that for many people, especially but not only Trump and MAGA, the political goal is inseparable from the frisson they get from seeing bad guys punished.  If they could achieve their goal without making someone suffer, that would take away much of their pleasure in the achievement.  As I've written in connection with religion, while many people are uncomfortable with the idea of eternal torment for (other) sinners, many others demand it.  If they won't get to view the suffering of the damned from the bosom of Abraham, what's the point of salvation?  It helps that the idea of Hell is built into New Testament Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. This is a useful idea, I believe, since unlike sending random brown people to brutal prisons in El Salvador, Hell in whatever religious tradition is a fantasy.  It's not something people have to believe in, it's something they like to believe in.  And making it so, on Earth as in Hades, is still one of the most popular parts of Trump's agenda.

Snatched from the Maw of the Orphan-Crushing Machine

  

This is the sort of remark from Francis that won the hearts of many a non-believer, but I don't get the appeal.  

In the first place, while Jesus' teaching on eternal punishment was as inconsistent as the rest of his teaching, it was a theme he returned to often enough that I see no reason to believe it wasn't dear to his heart.  Some scholars have tried to get around it by pointing out that his teaching on the matter wasn't the fully-developed doctrine the later churches produced, but one could say the same of pretty much all his teaching.  He wasn't a theologian or a scholar, he was a back-country faith-healer and end-times preacher, and even if every word ascribed to him in the gospels were authentic (not likely!), we'd have a very sketchy set of doctrines just begging to be filled in by later followers.

A number of Christian apologists have tried to scratch out hints in the gospels of a more conciliatory doctrine that doesn't involve eternal torment, but hints are all they have.  (Yes, the second-century Christian thinker Origen of Alexandria was one such; but he was declared a heretic, and he lived in a notorious hotbed of Gnosticism, so not many would endorse his ideas if they weren't desperate for an ancient precedent.  For example: the evidence is dubious, but most scholars seem to accept a much later rumor that he made himself a eunuch for the Kingdom; should modern Christians follow him in that as well?)  If Jesus did believe and teach that no one would go to hell, that would count against the reliability of the gospels as a source of his teaching.

I've noticed that many of the same people who let wishful thinking be their guide will also denounce Christians with dogmas they dislike as ignoring the overwhelming two-thousand-year bulk of Christian tradition.  When they do it -- and Hell is part of that tradition -- it's suddenly of no account.  I understand why they do it, but I'm not obligated to respect their reasons or their conclusions.

One more thing struck me when I saw the post above, though.  I've seen numerous variations on this theme on the internet over the years:

Why would Hell exist in the first place?  Why would you need to pay to stay or get out of it?  I've written about this before too: faced with solid ancient tradition about suffering after death, people just invent loopholes to get around it.  When the Pope let slip his rejection of two thousand years of Catholic tradition about divine Justice, that's what he was doing.  I wouldn't expect an elderly cleric to reject that tradition, of course: he has too much invested in it to do such a thing. But for non-Catholics and non-theists who get all excited about his qualms is, to my mind, like rejoicing over a child's lemonade stand raising money to save a few* orphans from the orphan-crushing machine.  It's the mildest, safest objection to a horrible, inhumane doctrine that, on top of everything else, is pure invention. There is no hell, there is no heaven, and anybody who claims to know how to escape one or get into the other is a scammer.  "Yeah, but he's a nice, kindly scammer who wishes nobody needed his snake oil!" should be embarrassing, but a lot of people think it's a sign of their good judgment and character.

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*Remember that Jesus taught that only a few would be saved, and most would be damned.  So "few" is precisely correct here.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

Kamala Harris addressed the Leading Women Defined Summit (what?) the other day.

 

She decried people who weren't doing anything, which was interesting because the people who aren't doing anything are the leadership of the Democratic Party, notably Senator Chuck Schumer.  She doesn't seem to have named any names here.  And then she said, "I'm not here to say 'I told you so,' but ..." (which of course she was) before bursting into her familiar drunken wine-mom laughter and adding "I swore I wasn't going to say that."  Okay, fine, but why say it to a crowd of her fans, who presumably voted for her?

A lot of people tried to tell her so during the campaign.  They told her it was a bad idea to defend and support Israeli atrocities.  They told her it was a bad idea to insult and mock important segments of her base.  They told her it was a bad idea to court the Cheney crime family.  They told her she needed to distance herself from Biden.  And so on. She ignored such good advice, preferring to listen to the worst people in her party.  If she had won despite all this, she could gloat and wag a finger at her critics.  It's entirely possible that she'd have lost anyway; but she lost, badly.

I hadn't watched this clip until I saw another one, in which her former running mate Tim Walz criticized her remarks.  Walz is often erratic, but he did a good job here.  He even admitted his own mistakes. True to Democratic establishment form, Harris blamed everyone except herself.

In Our Hands

Someone posted the above clip on Facebook the other day; luckily for me and this post, it was also available on YouTube.  (Probably it came from there.)  I haven't seen The Good Lie, a 2014 movie about Sudanese refugees in the US, and I don't know whether I will.  But this bit stirred up my urge to write.

It appears that the three young men have been brought to the US, and their caseworker (Witherspoon) has brought them to see the bald guy, who is evidently a farmer, presumably to stay with him.  (I said I haven't watched it yet.)  They ask permission to see his cows, and ask if there are any dangerous animals they should watch out for.  Permission received, they walk off, hand in hand.  The bald guy mutters, "I wish they wouldn't do that."  Given that this is America and he's the people of the land, the common clay of the New West, I sympathize with him slightly.  A good many gay American men would read the gesture the same way, except that they would jerk off to it.

Some commenters on the Facebook clip said that holding hands didn't mean the young Africans were gay, which is true, but added that it was no longer seen that way in Africa because of American gays, which probably is not true: it is because of viciously antigay bigots in Africa, abetted by viciously antigay American Christians.  (As some scholars have noticed before, non-Western bigots love to claim that homosexuality is a Western import, even as they happily import Western antigay religious and medical bigotry for their own agenda.)  As recently as 2019, though, I saw male African students in my college town holding hands with one another; it was orientation time for international students, and they'd probably been warned about US attitudes so they looked somewhat nervous, but they held on.

What I'm asking here is why men holding hands came to be seen as a sign of homosexuality in the United States.  During the US invasion of Vietnam, I read that American soldiers saw South Vietnamese soldiers holding hands and decided they were homosexuals. This fed their contempt for the ARVN, though it's likely that NLF and North Vietnamese men also held hands: they were just unlikely to be observed by Americans, and South Vietnamese troops were capable of as much manly violence as Americans could wish.  This was during the 1960s and early 1970s, and I doubt that American grunts had ever actually seen homosexuals holding hands in the US in those days.

Some might argue that men holding hands just is gay, it's common sense.  But it isn't, as shown by the number and expanse of cultures where it's routine.  Nor do those cultures accept male homosexuality.  In the US, norms of male-to-male affection have changed over time, and there's never been unanimity about them.  Walt Whitman's moist nineteenth-century poems about "adhesive" love between men seem to have appealed to many heterosexuals, as did the twentieth-century J. R. R. Tolkien's depiction of fondness between hobbits.  Academics, gay and straight like, refined the word "homosocial" to explain away these relationships, but couldn't explain why what previously had been endearing suddenly set off alarms.  In fact there had always been those who objected that there were "too many kisses in this work to avoid slander, suspicion and mockery."  Personally I favor slander, suspicion, and mockery of those trying to suppress displays of affection, but that's another post.

I associate holding hands with childhood: being required to hold someone's hand in public, while crossing the street, while standing in line with other children, and so on.  Children are ambivalent about it, if I may generalize from my own experience: it means you're a baby who can't be trusted to cross the street by yourself (which you can't), or you are ordered to hold the hand of someone you dislike, whose hands are sticky (unwashed isn't the problem, stickiness is).  But when they feel unsure or unsafe and can't crawl into someone's lap, they'll reach for someone else's hand.  It also signifies mutual belonging, for adults no less than children. Some Americans have explained foreign men holding hands to me as a sign of exceptional closeness and trust, but at best I think they're projecting.  At least it isn't always the case; men in other countries don't seem to need that much intimacy to reach for each other's hands.

Nor should they.  Numerous writers, such as the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, have stressed the importance of physical contact for all people, from infants to adults.  I remember someone telling me in the early 70s, about when Montagu's book was published, that American men could only allow themselves to seek touch through sex.  That's probably still true for many of us, but I have the impression that things have improved since then, and American men are more affectionate than they used to be.  But there's still room, and need, for improvement.  We must respect each others' boundaries, and no one including children should be compelled or pressured to give touch.  One reason I think it's important to push back hard on antigay bigotry is that it is used not only against sex between men, but against affection as well.  That's harmful not only to gay men but to straight ones, and it must not be tolerated.

Speaking of Coincidences ...

I recently read Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), pieced together by Jesse Green, with entertaining and informative footnotes, from the reminiscences of Mary Rodgers.  She was the daughter of the composer Richard Rodgers, and she knew a vast array of musical-theater people, from her parents to Stephen Sondheim and beyond.  The book offers up a spicy buffet of dish on all of them, including herself.  It's not for everyone; many readers were offended by her bluntness and openness.  "Make it meaner," she told Green when he showed her his early drafts; "Make it funnier."  He did.

Rodgers was also a composer, a writer, a producer.  Among her credits is the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress, which gave Carol Burnett her big break.  I believe I saw the first TV version, broadcast in 1964, but there have been two more since then.  She also worked on Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, broadcast on TV from 1958 to 1972, which I watched regularly in its first years.

In 1966 Rodgers composed a ditty known as "The Boy from..." for an off-Broadway revue, The Mad Show.  Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics, which parody the bossa nova hit "The Girl from Ipanema" but also draw on Rodgers' admitted tendency to fall in love with gay men, such as her first husband and Sondheim himself:

Why are his trousers vermilion?
Why does he claim he's Castilian?
Why do his friends call him Lillian?
And I hear at the end of the week
he's leaving to start a boutique.

The original recording was sung by the actress Linda Lavin, with a breathy -- indeed breathless -- delivery exaggerating Astrud Gilberto's in "Ipanema."  It took me several listenings to fully appreciate Lavin's performance, partly because the recording level was low, but it grew on me. 

Not being a musicals queen, I hadn't heard of Lavin until Rodgers mentioned her in connection with this song.  Then, a few days after I read Shy, I began seeing YouTube clips from a new sitcom, Mid-century Modern, in which Linda Lavin plays the mother of one of the characters.  Interviews with the other cast members contain praise of her greatness and sadness for her loss; she died of cancer in the middle of production of the first season.  At some point I realized that her name rang a bell, but it took me a few days to make the connection.  If I were the kind of believer who sees the world that way, I'd say that God must have been in there somewhere; luckily, I'm not.

We Have Never Been Modern

I recently read When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan (St. Martin's Press, 2019) for a book club, and have mixed feelings about it.  It's a well-done, readable history that draws on some familiar sources and delving into the archives, and on the whole I recommend it.  I learned about the history of Brooklyn, which usually is lost in the shadows of Manhattan, and got some insight into the rise and fall of cities.

What bothered me was Ryan's frequent invocation of "the modern idea of sexuality", with the implication that people used to have old-fashioned, inadequate concepts of queerness that we have, fortunately, moved beyond.  I think he knows better, as I'll try to show, but he keeps returning to that formula.  For example:

However, we can see that Roebling understood his love for his friend to be of the same cloth as his friend’s love for him; it is at most a difference of quantity, not quality. The idea of “homosexuality” had not yet emerged as a separate kind of male-male intimacy. What stands out from this story, aside from Roebling’s lack of shock or disgust, is the absence of any specific words for this type of desire (or the men who profess it) [40].

Or:

The idea that people had a fixed, inborn set of sexual desires that were permanent and could be used to classify humanity into groups was only just emerging among theorists in Europe. There was little agreed-upon language to even discuss those feelings. As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out in his essay, the job of the poet is that of language-maker, the person who documents and names the new experiences of the times [24].

I could quote many more examples.  There are a lot of problems in this theme.  For one, are the experiences Ryan is writing about "new"?  He's referring partly to the idea of community, of people classifying themselves into groups based on erotic interests and practice.  It's open to question whether this tendency is new, even in the US: the little communities of "mollies" in eighteenth-century England fascinated gay historians a couple of decades ago, for instance, and social networks and cruising areas are documented around the world, throughout history. There's a substantial literature on this.  I can't tell whether Ryan ignores it because it's not immediately relevant to the topic of queer Brooklyn, or whether he's unaware of it.  One can question how much mollies, sodomites, sapphists and others theorized their communities, but that's not very important unless one is determined to limit "community" to late twentieth-century commercial gay men's culture.  Unfortunately, many are.  But theorizing beyond an ad hoc minimum mostly interests only a small minority of queers, and even those few tend not to do it very well.

For another, as Ryan shows abundantly, "a fixed, inborn set of sexual desires that were permanent" doesn't accurately describe more than a minority of the men and women he's writing about.  This is most obvious in the milieu of sexually-receptive men ("fairies" et al.) and the men ("trade") who penetrate them, whether for money or convenience or both.  Ryan devotes a lot of space to this pattern, at least partly because it's so well-documented in old criminal records, newspapers, and medical literature.  He steps gingerly around the question of the actual sexual orientation of the insertive trade, who according to the lore were younger and would age out of the market as they married and found steady employment.  (This is debatable in many cases, but it's the lore.)

This idea is complicated further by talk of "sexual fluidity," that "We're all a little bit gay," that "most people are bi except for a few at each end of the bell curve."  Despite lip service to such slogans, bisexuality is regarded with skepticism and hostility by many gay men and lesbians.  Among gay men at least, there's a common belief that at heart, trade really only want to be penetrated, and the same gay men who believe themselves doomed by biology to be bottoms turn out to be tops with regard to the very tops they value so much.  (As I've argued before, this is reminiscent of sexist males' belief that all women are really whores at heart.)  There's an analogous uneasiness about femme women among lesbians.  Both concepts -- fixity and plasticity -- coexist in the supposedly modern concept of sexuality.  Ryan's evidence shows this, but he resists it; at least, he never seems to notice the contradiction.  I think it's significant that belief in a fixed homosexual nature arose and became dominant at the same time that evidence against it multiplied not only in accounts like Ryan's but in "common sense" talk about sex.  It's also ironic that "queer," Ryan's label of choice, was rehabilitated in the 1990s against the supposed rigidity of gay and lesbian identities, only to be folded back into supposedly scientific theories of biologically fixed sexual orientation.

To his credit, Ryan is aware of the historical connection of biological determinism and the "modern conception of homosexuality", which I've addressed here before.  Ryan writes:

Early twentieth-century medical science was dominated by the eugenics movement, which believed social problems were rooted in deviant bodies and inheritable traits. This movement reached its apogee with the sadistic, anti-Semitic science of the Holocaust, which has allowed us to conveniently forget the power and prevalence of the eugenics movement in America. Just as people of color, women, and queer people were gaining social power and becoming visible, eugenic science would be trotted out to prove that black people were less human, women were less intelligent, and queer people were a biological dead end that threatened to contaminate good (white) Americans [76].

He doesn't mention class, which was a fixation of the more respectable elements of the eugenics movement, and still is a fallback for it.  But he also writes that "Sigmund Freud’s system of psychoanalysis, and his ideas about sexuality residing in the human mind, only reached American shores in 1909. It would take long decades before they would supplant eugenic ideas about the body as our dominant way of understanding sexuality (and personality in general)" [77]  Is he really unaware that Freud became a whipping boy for feminists and post-Stonewall gay activists, who rightly attacked the psychiatric profession for its role in pathologizing women and homosexuals?  That was before we assimilated ourselves into the profession, and accepted biological determinism while forgetting its ties to eugenics.

He writes:

The same doctors who would define “the homosexual” as a biological class unto itself would also define “the pickpocket” that way, and “the woman who is erotically stimulated by hat pins” as well. Today, it seems natural to view homosexuality this way, and ridiculous to think that being a pickpocket might be a hereditary, biologically defined class. But this is the biased, thoroughly unscientific swamp from which our modern ideas about sexuality arose [77].

I agree, so I don't understand why he writes uncritically about "our modern ideas about sexuality" elsewhere in the book.  Ryan also seems to think that the modern concepts of "transgender" and "intersex" are somehow more valid than their predecessors, that nineteenth- and twentieth-century "fairies" and bulldaggers were really "intersex" or "transgender"?  These concepts, which might sometimes be useful, are just newer social constructions, with the same contradictions and inadequacies as older ideas. That's because "sex" and "gender" are still incoherent and poorly thought out -- possibly more than ever.

So, for example:

According to Ward Hall, a gay man who got his start in the circus in the early 1940s, these [sideshow] acts were sometimes performed by people who were actually intersex, but they were also done by effeminate men and masculine women whose gender presentations were already so at odds with what the audience expected that they believed them to be physically intersex as well [116].

Or again, of a self-identified "fairy" who

told Shufeldt that she was, in our modern terms, intersex (meaning her body had a mixture of typically male and female characteristics), and that she had previously been pregnant. Shufeldt disputed this with his medical examinations, which were so thorough they bordered on being a cavity search. It’s impossible to know what to make of Loop’s assertions. Did she truly believe herself to be intersex? Was this an elaborate camp put on by a fairy out to have some fun with a serious doctor? [79]

Was she "really" intersex?  Apparently not, but Ryan doesn't tell what word she used.  "Intersex" was intended to replace the older "hermaphrodite," which referred to individuals with "both" sets of reproductive organs.  Such individuals are vanishingly rare, so "intersex" might be a slight improvement.  But it seems to have been stretched to include a wide variety of traits, including smaller-than-average penises or larger-than-average clitorises, with the associated assumption of determined gender behavior such as dress or career choices.  And from what I see in online discussion, many people confuse "transgender" with "intersex," and many transgender individuals are trying to base their identities in biology.  It isn't only scientists who love eugenics and biological determinism.

When Brooklyn Was Queer includes a lot of interesting information, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in LGBTQ history.  Just pay attention to the man behind the curtain.  As so often happens, his theory is at odds with his data, but that's useful to know too.  I've never thought that I needed different words for my feelings for other men: it was our enemies who insisted that what I felt wasn't love.  "Same-sex desire" is just desire.  Despite many years of determined efforts to prove otherwise, men who love men and women who love women are biologically speaking just men and women.  Of course "men" and "women" are not obvious (or pre-cultural) categories either, but traditionalists again are the source of the confusion, because of their wish to police other people's gender and erotic lives - a wish that unfortunately is shared by many non-traditionalists.

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Page references are to the Kindle edition.

Spread 'Em, Jesse!

I've been mulling over a post on the epidemic of male loneliness, but I think I can address this aspect of it without running on too long.

Some liberal Xers tutted over Fox News pundit Jesse Watters here.  I chose this moment for a screenshot because it shows Watters's legs spread wide under the table.  No disagreement from me, of course: his rules are laughable.

One commenter wrote, "I think a lot of these men have had it enforced into them their whole lives and are afraid themselves of being seen as lesser for not following these 'rules', which also includes making fun of men who don't participate in these behaviors".  This is probably true, but it only raises the question of where those rules came from.  People love to blame customs they dislike on religion, but there's nothing in the Bible about milkshakes, straws, or crossing one's legs.  Even if there were, such taboos would be human inventions, like every other religious teaching.  People observe those rules selectively anyway, even or especially when they pay them lip service.

But I noticed that all the mockery was directed at Watters.  He deserves it, but so does Tim Walz, Democratic governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris's erstwhile running mate.  The clip which prompted Watters's posturing showed Walz doing some posturing of his own, claiming that he "scares MAGA men with his masculinity" and "could kick most of their a** [sic]!"  I approve of Walz on many matters, and was glad to see him emerging from the shadows to attack the MAGA right, but adopting the same harmful and stupid standards of manhood as his opponents is not the way to do it.