A Cautionary Tale

This morning Amazon, like the Hand of Providence, threw into my path a book by James A. Lindsay, Everybody Is Wrong About God (Pitchstone Publishing, 2015).  Everyone except for James A. Lindsay, I figured, and I was right.  According to the accompanying blurb the book is:

A call to action to address people's psychological and social motives for a belief in God, rather than debate the existence of God  With every argument for theism long since discredited, the result is that atheism has become little more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. Thus, engaging in interminable debate with religious believers about the existence of God has become exactly the wrong way for nonbelievers to try to deal with misguided—and often dangerous—belief in a higher power. The key, author James Lindsay argues, is to stop that particular conversation. He demonstrates that whenever people say they believe in "God," they are really telling us that they have certain psychological and social needs that they do not know how to meet. Lindsay then provides more productive avenues of discussion and action. Once nonbelievers understand this simple point, and drop the very label of atheist, will they be able to change the way we all think about, talk about, and act upon the troublesome notion called "God."

I'm sympathetic with Lindsay's approach here.  I've benefited from reading the literature debating the existence of gods, but I was already an atheist when I began reading it.  I became an atheist quite young, at around the age of ten.  I was fascinated by Greek and Biblical mythology, and one day my father told me that I should know that some people don't believe in God.  "Why not?" I asked. "Well," he replied, "they don't feel any need to."  I took my time absorbing this information, and I don't know exactly when I realized that I was one of those people, but I did.  After all, I didn't have much of an idea of what God was before; he was sort of like Santa Claus, of whose existence I'd been disabused some years earlier, or the Greek gods.  Learning what it meant to be an atheist took a lot more time and thought.  I'm still learning, but debating whether gods exist doesn't interest me any more than debating whether homosexuality is okay.

The trouble with Lindsay's stance is that it cuts both ways; we atheists, when we say we don't believe in "God," are really telling theists that we have certain psychological and social needs that we don't know how to meet.  Everyone does.  Human beings aren't rational creatures at heart; we can learn to use reason, but our needs and drives are pre- or sub-rational.  Does Lindsay realize that he's echoing, almost parodying, a popular Christian missionary line here?  I don't think so.  But it's also reminiscent of Almost-New Atheist Sam Harris's conviction that people who criticize American foreign policy are "masochistic," and need to have our eyes opened to the healing light he brings, that we may have life more abundantly (and Muslims have it less).

And -- surprise, surprise -- I downloaded the Kindle sample of Everybody Is Wrong About God, and found that Harris is for Lindsay one of "the most prominent atheist writers of the beginning of this century, among them Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, the late Victor Stenger, and Jerry Coyne."  "Prominent" seems to be damning this pan-atheon with faint praise, I must admit, but Lindsay thinks that they have definitively brought theism low.  He says he will work with a "clarified position on the term atheism, one that speaks back to the meaning originally put forward" by Harris et al.  This is also odd: did they -- does Lindsay -- believe that there was no atheism before the twenty-first century?  From what I've read of their work, which I admit isn't enough, they were just following in the footsteps of much smarter writers.  David Hume, for one.  And far from what you might call post-theists, which is what Lindsay seems to be aiming for, they are very noisily anti-theist.

Lindsay also says that "we need to understand myth.  Myth doesn't just mean a misinterpretation of a phenomenon."  (Actually, it doesn't mean that at all.  I'll return to that point shortly.)

At the core of myth is a blend of misinterpretation, obscuring ignorance, and yet clear apprehension, but what is most relevant about mythology is none of these.  True, myths are built out of ignorance, often due in part to the complexity of the subject matter at their cores, and, true, myths are a kind of misinterpretation of that subject matter.  On the other hand, and importantly, also true is that myths encapsulate some degree of understanding of what they represent -- otherwise they'd be far less compelling than they are.  What is most relevant about myths, however, is exactly what makes them most compelling: myths are culturally relevant narratives that simplify complex or unclear phenomena and that speak to people at the level of their psychological needs.  Narratives of this kind, though, are exactly what religions provide for people, and it is therefore precisely this observation that illustrates why God, at the center of so many religious beliefs, is a mythological construct.

This isn't far from the view of a theistic apologist like Karen Armstrong.  The main difference is that Armstrong allows more understanding and knowledge to mythology.  But they're both wrong.  There's a lot of scholarly debate about just what myth is, and at best Lindsay is addressing only a subset of the material.  It's not even sure how much the ancients believed their myths.  Some scholars argue that at least some myths encode not ignorance, but knowledge about the world, perhaps to keep it esoteric.  But it ill becomes Lindsay to dismiss ignorance, since everyone is ignorant of more than they know, including Lindsay.  Indeed, "ignorance" and "superstition" are both religious concepts.  Especially going by the mythos of Modern Science, everyone today is an ignorant savage compared to those who will follow us in centuries to come.  He has, as far as I can tell from what I've read of the book so far, a rather backward conception of religion, as a bunch of silly stories invented to keep the rabble happy and controlled.  It appears that he hopes to fill the shoes of the elites who developed religion for that purpose in the first place.

Take the last sentence I quoted, which has the form of a logical conclusion but isn't one.  First, mythology is only part of any religion, and it's likely that ritual predates mythology.  People create narratives for their own sake, and only rationalize them afterward.  Mythology is a part of epics like the Gilgamesh cycle, the Homeric epics, and the Torah, but only part; and I wouldn't care to pontificate as to their purposes.  In Greek drama, which originated as part of religious festivals, the gods are used as part of the stories, just like the human characters, who are also mythological though not divine.  Myth is part of the backdrop of any human society.

Second, because human beings think narratively, mythic narratives aren't specific to religion.  It's a cliche that nations have their own mythologies, and the United States is no exception: Columbus, who defied superstitious belief in a flat earth to discover America; the Pilgrim Fathers, who fled persecution to build a haven for religious freedom in the New World; the Founding Fathers, who in their wisdom created a new nation devoted to freedom for all men; and so on.  (I know that these are ahistorical; that's the point.)  So does science, not just with heroic tales about the Patriarchs -- all male, naturally -- who defied superstition to bring Man the light of knowledge, of Galileo muttering "It still moves" after being forced to recant his claim that the earth moves around the sun, Thomas Huxley totally destroying Bishop Samuel Wilberforce over Evolution in 1860, of Watson and Crick cracking the DNA code by themselves, down to bold cowboy geeks inventing the computer in their garages without a penny of government money -- but with a mythology of the Scientific Method, which bears little or no resemblance to what scientists actually do.  But scientists believe in it, because it speaks to their psychological needs.  The myth of evolution as a linear ascent from lower to higher, dumber to smarter, is also popular among those with Faith in Science.  You might be able to get rid of religion, narrowly and tendentiously defined, but mythology won't be eliminated easily, if at all.

Unwittingly supporting my position, Lindsay declares a little later, "We saw the idea of racism collapse long before the culture started really catching on, a process lamentably still continuing today." This, lamentably, isn't true.  The idea of the oneness of humanity is actually much older and is found in some universalizing religions, but in the late 1800s the "idea of racism" moved from "the culture" to science, where it's comfortably entrenched to this day, along with the "idea of sexism."  Lindsay has degrees in physics and mathematics, but he doesn't know much about history.

If the price of Everybody Is Wrong About God is marked down, I might try reading the whole thing, but so far it isn't promising.  As numerous people have said, including me: the trouble isn't that people are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so.

Gentlemen Callers

This isn't the first variation I've seen on this theme, posted on Facebook by a gay male friend around 40 years old.  I have to remind myself that if social media had been around when I was 40, I probably would have posted such things myself. So let's imagine that I'm writing this to my younger self.

Actually, though, 40 was roughly when I realized that I wasn't really interested in a long-term committed relationship.  I already knew that the trouble (if it was trouble) lay with me, not with the men I met and dated.  I wanted someone to be there for me, but not all the time, just when I wanted him to be there, and that wasn't fair to him.  I knew some men who I wanted to be with more often, but not all the time, and probably not permanently.  It began to occur to me that I would be content if I had two or three occasional but ongoing partners -- the term Friends With Benefits hadn't been coined yet; "fuck buddies" had.  The trouble was that FWBs are hard to schedule: when I found several such a decade later, either I wouldn't see any of them for a month or more at a time, or they'd all come calling at the same time: feast or famine.  I also found that they had to be the ones who decided when to show up; if I invited them over, they'd get nervous.  But I realized I could live with that.

Sometimes one of the men I knew would drift away altogether.  He might move to another town, or get into a committed relationship, or just lose interest.  But before long someone else would find his way into my life.  I began to trust that I wasn't likely to be without willing partners for the foreseeable future.  Some of those FWB relationships went on for years, certainly longer than any attempted commitment I'd tried.  In some of them, the word "love" wasn't out of place, though it might have been if we'd moved in together.

Often I've encountered people who chided me, "What's going to happen to you when you're old and you're still alone?"  I pointed out that plenty of people get divorced or widowed: marriage, or even commitment is no guarantee over the long haul.  I didn't like the idea of someone staying with me out of guilt or fear; I didn't want to do it myself, so why would I inflict myself on someone else?  Admittedly, I have a greater tolerance for being alone than many other people, and conversely less tolerance for having company when I'd rather be alone, so the prospect of being solitary never terrified me the way it does other people.  I eventually realized that committed couples work out ways of getting time to themselves, they aren't joined at the hip 24/7.  For me, the amount of solo time I need is great enough that I preferred that it be the default: that I would rather be alone when I might have preferred company, than have company when I preferred to be alone.

But perhaps my chief objection to this meme is about the word "real," used as the opposite of "temporary."  I think my FWBs and one-night stands were "real."  Not only that, but I've had many nonsexual friendships that enriched my life wonderfully.  It was always a gamble, living in a college town with its transient population, whether I'd always find enough company to keep me going, but I did.  The words of Allen Ginsberg's psychoanalyst reassured me: "Oh, you're a nice person, there will always be people who'll like you."  I didn't believe that when I was 20, or 25 (me? nice?), but at about 30 I began to trust that I was likable enough: not to be smug about it, but to believe that I'd get by.  And so I have, though admittedly the current pandemic has thrown a wrench into the works.  Still, I know that it's not about me, and I'm doing all right, with enough friendly human interaction to warm my heart.

And anyway, we are all temporary.  Few long-term couples manage to die at the same time, which would be the best you could hope for if you demand that neither you nor your partner checks out ahead of the other.  And what does it mean to say that one shouldn't "entertain temporary people"?  How do you know that the person you've met will last for the rest of their life?  I've challenged some people on this point, and never got a convincing answer. "You just know" is the best they come up with, but I've learned as I observe their romantic careers over time that they don't know.  It seems to me that to find a serious partner you often have to audition many others who turn out not to be serious -- or you aren't serious about them; there's something very egoistic about this meme, as though one's own feelings are the only ones that matter.  Besides, the need to entertain people whose seriousness is unknown is proverbial: think of memes like "In order to find a prince you have to kiss a lot of frogs."

The only remedy I can think of is arranged marriage.  It works for some people, apparently, but I'll pass.  And I don't consider the men I've kissed over the past half-century to be frogs -- well, one or two, but in general they were perfectly fine people I just didn't want to spend the rest of my life with, or vice versa.  But that doesn't mean they were worthless, and the dismissive attitude toward ordinary humanity in this meme is disturbing.  If you aren't permanent, you're unreal, a waste of time.  The person who made this meme might just be projecting.

COUNTERPOINT: Duncan, You Ignorant Slut!

A friend posted this meme on Facebook today.

Though I agree with the importance of wearing masks, I have a lot of problems with the rhetoric here. Businesses are not friends of freedom, and are really the biggest threats to freedom today.  They're not natural friends of safety either, for their workers or their customers: there's a reason for the safety regulations we have, to limit the freedom of businesses.

As for "consequences," that's a popular word with authoritarians too. "You had sex, you're pregnant, so you have to accept the consequences - no abortion for you!" "You got raped? Well, you shouldn't have been out alone at that hour of the night.  Accept the consequences of your sluttishness!" "The police shot you in the eye? You should have stayed home, there are consequences for protesting!" How we frame these issues is as important as the issues themselves; maybe more so.  The people who refuse to wear masks, to stay away from crowds, to keep distance from others, are practically begging to be despised and scorned, but that's not a good reason to indulge them.  The same goes for the refusers who hassle others.  Punishment is an ineffective way of changing people's behavior, and if we really want to get people to wear masks, we want effective measures, not ineffective ones.  Demagoguery isn't going to close the divisions that everyone deplores. 

The use of "asshole" reminds me of another creepy authoritarian, anti-freedom meme, that famous xkcd comic that also used "asshole" as a punchline.  Who is it that decides when you're an asshole for behaving badly, or speaking out of turn?  It's usually not the audiences; to the extent that it is, it's called "cancel culture," and our guardians of free speech are deeply concerned about it.  It's the corporations, the bosses, the rulers. The rest of us shouldn't side with them.  When the cruelty becomes the point, it's time to stop and think for a while.  The law of talion (an eye for an eye) is meant to restrain our sadistic fantasies, not indulge them.

If you jump off a high building, getting squashed is what you might call a natural consequence.  If you refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic, the natural consequences are the risk of getting sick, and of passing it along to someone you may care about.  I read today about a young woman who went to a party, contracted COVID-19, unknowingly gave it to her grandfather, became ill and was intubated in the hospital.  Her grandfather died of it, a day or two before the girl was taken out of the ICU.  That would be very hard to live with for the rest of your life.  We need to think twice before inventing and delighting in artificial consequences.  Deciding where to draw the line isn't easy, but if I want to be better than the assholes, it's what I have to do.

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.

Apostrophobia

I don't know why "Have we murdered the apostrophe?" popped up in Firefox recommendations on my tablet today.  The article was posted at BBC.com in February.  But it was effective clickbait, and it's not without interest.

I learned from it that the apostrophe was invented in the early 1500s, evidently by a French printer who also invented the cedilla and the accent.  At first it was used to indicate the omission of one or more letters, as in contractions.  "And sometimes they were added in for no obvious reason, for example in this line, by 17th Century poet Robert Herrick: 'What fate decreed, time now ha's made us see.'"

It wasn't until the 1600s and 1700s that the apostrophe began to signify the possessive in nouns and pronouns.

But it clearly took some time for the apostrophe to take hold. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were among the many authors inconsistent in their apostrophe use. And there was confusion or disagreement from the very early days of its deployment – that has not entirely cleared up five centuries later. It’s worth remembering that there has never been a time when people agreed on the ‘correct’ function of the apostrophe. "Not only does such consensus not exist in the past, it doesn’t exist now: the role of this troubling little punctuation mark is still in flux," as Merriam Webster puts it.

"Take hold" seems wrong somehow.  It sounds to me like the apostrophe took hold quickly, and ran riot in the fields of English writing.  But yes, writers of English evidently didn't quite know what to do with this rambunctious little Frenchman.

As the article acknowledges, one difficulty is that the apostrophe has different functions - omission, to signal the possessive, and though author Hélène Schumacher doesn't mention it, in British usage it signals direct quotation (though then it's known as a single quote, but it's the same mark; in American usage it's a quotation mark when a quotation is nested within another quotation).  I'm not sure how important this particular issue is.  I'm more inclined to blame ineffective and sometimes wrongheaded teaching, with the expectation that students should pick up the complexity of apostrophe use quickly.  With schools more and more dominated by standardized testing, there's even less time than there was formerly.

I'm a grammar / punctuation / spelling neurotic myself, and it annoys me when I encounter "it's" as the possessive of it.  But I still want to advocate what I consider the best solution to the problem of "misuse" of the apostrophe:

Get rid of it.

This is not a Modest Proposal.  I'm serious about it, so let me anticipate an obvious objection.  Schumacher quotes "Colin Matthews, head of English at Churchfields Primary School in Beckenham, England," who huffs that

he doesn’t think the evolution of language is "an excuse not to be clear and unambiguous". For him, teaching grammar is about avoiding ambiguity; it’s not about "knowing how an apostrophe is used; it's about clarity in meaning." ...

There are, of course, multitudes who survive perfectly well without knowing how to use apostrophes, but Matthews believes that while there are still prospective employers "who will throw a job application in the bin if the apostrophes are wrong," we need to continue teaching children how to use them correctly.

Ah, there, you see -- it's not him, it's those "prospective employers," and he's thinking only of the children and their futures.  This just tells me that he's just throwing objections at the wall in hopes that one of them will stick.  If the issue really were clarity in meaning, then it wouldn't matter what employers think.  Many of them don't know or care how to punctuate or spell either: Schumacher mentions companies like the British bookseller Waterstones, which recently dropped the apostrophe from its name to make it "more 'versatile' for online use", and the American company Lands' End, which "has maintained the use of an incorrect apostrophe and built it into its heritage. Wouldn't the same objection justify racial or religious bigotry: I would never discriminate, all are precious and equal in my sight, but there's no point in sending Jews to apply when "prospective employers" won't hire them.  Just convert all the kids to the C of E.

(An aside: the article includes a photograph of the New York Times building, with the caption, "Publications such as The New York Times serve to arbiter what is wrong or right when it comes to apostrophes and other grammatical usage."  According to my Merriam-Webster's College Dictionary, Tenth Edition, "arbiter" is a noun, not a verb.  The unabridged agrees.  Does the BBC trump their authority?)

However, as Tom Hyndley, the headmaster of Churchfields Primary School notes, the apostrophe is certainly valuable in its ability to aid comprehension in written English: "my view, probably like many in education, is that grammar [such as apostrophes] is useful because of its ability to clarify, change or convey meaning not as an end in its own right.”

I agree.  As a writer, I love the way that subtle use of punctuation, word order -- all kinds of factors -- can be used to convey meaning in writing.  But when I thought about it for a while, I had trouble remembering or thinking of instances where an apostrophe did such a thing.  Far more often, it seems to me that I am tripped up by the "misuse" of apostrophes, annoyed when someone writes "it's" for "its", puts an apostrophe into a plural, and the like.  At a minimum, if I had dictatorial power I would make "it's" the possessive form of "it."  It shouldn't cause confusion with "it's" as a contraction, since it doesn't seem to with other nouns.  The irregularity of the form confuses far more people than it clarifies, and it mainly serves as a club for language snobs to bash other people with.  I think we should take that club from their well-manicured hands and throw it away.

Still, I want to go further.  I don't think we need the apostrophe for possessive nouns either, or for contractions.  Bernard Shaw, among other writers, insisted on printing contractions without apostrophes, and it doesn't seem to confuse anyone for more than a minute or two.  Context will signal whether a noun is a possessive or a plural.  If teachers can't develop ways to teach students how to use the apostrophe "correctly" -- and centuries of confusion argue that they can't -- then it creates more confusion and ambiguity than it prevents.  I come to bury the apostrophe, not to praise it.  I'd miss it, but I'm willing to sacrifice my comfort for the greater good.

The Gay 70s?

Armistead Maupin linked to this appreciation of his first novel, Tales of the City, from the Advocate's website.  I hadn't heard of the writer, Kurt Niece, before, but that doesn't mean much.  I'm a big fan of the series, which I began reading when only two of the ultimately nine volumes had appeared.

It's odd, but although I enjoyed them Maupin's books never made me want to visit San Francisco very much, and I didn't go there until the late 1990s, when the series was in hiatus; so I don't remember the City of that era.  But I don't recognize gay life in the 70s from Niece's reminiscence at all, even if I make allowance for the "rose-colored glasses" he looks through.  He remembers

casual sex, cruising and bars. When I was very young, being gay was illegal. Homosexuality was viewed as a reprehensible and allegedly treatable psychiatric condition. But even so, being gay felt easier and far less complicated then.

I met my partners in person. The internet was science fiction and screen time was devoted to a handful of broadcast television stations and basic cable. There was a perception that since we were outlaws and criminals, and since most STDs could be treated with a big dose of antibiotics, then what the hell? Whoop it up! Go for it with the understanding that Auntie Mame is right – life is a banquet and most of those poor suckers are starving. 

Everyone has their own experience, and their own perspective.  But being gay was never illegal in the US: what was illegal was sex between males.  The line was blurred in practice, of course, and probably most straights as well as most gays were probably vague about the distinction.  I remember a bit in Martin Hoffman's important book The Gay World (Basic Books, 1968), which I read in 1969 or so: one of Hoffman's informants says "Maybe I'll move to San Francisco, gay kids are legal there."  Hoffman comments, as I just did, that it was sex, not being gay, that was illegal.  California's sodomy law wasn't repealed until 1975, so Hoffman's informant was wrong however you think about it.  As I remember, Hoffman also stressed that homosexuals were usually not charged with sodomy, but with lewd behavior, indecency, and other (probably unconstitutionally vague, but go figure) offenses, and those statutes weren't affected by the 1975 repeal.

San Francisco police had laid off to some extent by the time Tales of the City was written, but not entirely, so there was a very real sense in which gay men especially were criminals and outlaws in those days.  I don't believe Tales or its sequels had much to say about this aspect of gay life; a gay cop is an ongoing minor character later on, when the makeup of the police force was changing.  Antigay violence was an ongoing threat, including the gay ghettos, and there's a gay bashing in the third book of the series.  Then there was the assassination of City Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone by an antigay bigot in 1978, followed by the White Night Riots after the assassin was let off lightly by a jury.  I don't recall that Maupin ever touched on those events in the series.  "Less complicated"?  In the eye of the beholder, I guess, especially when the eye is hazed over by nostalgia.

As for meeting one's partners in person, that too is a slight oversimplification.  Gay men developed a number of ways to "meet" without getting too personal about it: the baths (with orgy rooms that let you "meet" in the dark in groups; bars also featured these), the public restrooms.  The Advocate's personal ads were notorious for their reduction of desired partners to a few fetishes; the Internet is just the evolution and fulfilment of that aspect of gay male life.  Niece reports a conversation with a much younger friend, presumably gay, and his uneasiness comparing the promiscuity of the 70s with what he assumes to be the wholesome domesticity of today:

I wondered what it would be like to have been settled and married and have had only one or two sex partners for the entirety of my life. What would it have been like to live life devoted to just one person? There was an unsettling regret that perhaps my life was not as well lived as I’d imagined.

This is baffling.  Young gay men are not, as far as I can tell, any less interested in promiscuity than their foreuncles were; what does he imagine they use the Internet for? That men can marry each other doesn't mean they're automatically going to be monogamous, any more than married heterosexuals are.  The male couples in Maupin's series aren't monogamous, certainly, but they remain devotedly together for years. Niece is viewing the past fifty years not through rose-colored glasses so much as through blinders that distort present and past alike in the service of stereotypes that are no tribute to Maupin's work.

Niece says his favorite passage in Tales is the one where Michael Tolliver and Brian Hawkins, gay and straight respectively, are sharing a joint and speculating about the future.  Michael says, “People like you and me…we’re gonna be 55-year-old Libertines in a world full of 20-year old Calvinists.”  Alas (or maybe not), it's a false prophecy.  If he weren't a fictional character, Michael would be 69 this year, and a good many of the real-life 20-year-olds are chasing each other on Grindr and other "dating" apps.  A lot of them are partnered, engaged, even married.  Things haven't changed that much. Even AIDS didn't bring about the utopia of terrified monogamy that so many Calvinists pretended to want, though I suspect like their nominally heterosexual counterparts, many of them violated their own strictures when they thought no one was looking.

My favorite scene from the series (well, one of them; I have several) involves the gay cop, Bill Rivera, who's visited by his brother's ex-lover's brother from somewhere out east.  The visitor has brought a bunch of fetish gear with him, and spends his entire vacation "trashing around."  Before he leaves, he tells his host: "You know, Bill, I could never live here - it's just too decadent!"  This perfectly sums up to me the ability of many people to dissociate their actual behavior from their pretenses about themselves.  No virus can eradicate that.

Honeymoon? We Aren't Even Married Yet!

After someone on Twitter criticized the Biden campaign's decision to invite the Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich, to address the upcoming Democratic convention, a stable genius replied:

Kasich is anti-union, so it's hard to see how he's going to inspire the Democrats' union base; he's also an antigay bigot, and a former failed Republican Presidential candidate and therefore of Satan.  Or so you'd think.  Are Democratic voters such weak reeds that they need to know that Republicans dislike Trump too, or they won't be able to drag themselves to the polling stations?

Notice too that dismissive "spar over policy."  No doubt he'll say the same thing after Biden is elected and guts Social Security and Medicare, forces workers to work in a pandemic or starve, bails out Wall Street again, and vetoes the new voting rights bill.  That most people aren't just sparring, which is to say playing, but concerned about their lives and their families' lives and the lives of everyone who isn't at least a multimillionaire, escapes him.

We went through this in 2008, I remember.  Before Obama was elected, we skeptics were told that after he won we could hold his feet to the fire and make him enact good policies.  But as soon as he was elected, before he even took office, we were told to back off, give him a chance, it was too soon to judge him, wait and see what he'd do.  As I pointed out at the time, his corporate donors and friends weren't backing off: they were making sure he made the appointments they wanted, pushing him in the direction they wanted him to go.  True, he would have done it anyway, because his priorities lay in corporatism and protecting the powerful from accountability.  And it's doubtful how much pressure anyone to his left could have brought to bear on him.  His few good appointments, such as Hilda Solis, were quietly eased out in a few months.  Anyone the Right disliked had to go; Obama was very obliging.

So this is all annoyingly familiar.  Biden is already surrounding himself with some of the same people Obama gravitated to, such as Larry Summers.  His sycophants are telling us to wait and see, to give him a chance.  I look forward to seeing the last of Trump, though former Presidents rarely disappear from public life altogether.  But as Biden has said, nothing will fundamentally change under his presidency, and those who try to push him in a better direction will face not only his inertia, but the vindictive fury of his Democratic cult.  It won't be pretty.