Earlier in the day, Bush held a National Security Council meeting on the war. He was to discuss the latest developments by secure videoconference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki at 9:40 a.m. (1440 GMT), said spokeswoman Dana Perino.
Then at 11:30, the president will make a statement on the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in the Roosevelt Room. It will last about five minutes and he will take no questions," she told AFP by telephone.
On the other hand, when has this spoiled brat ever suffered being questioned?
I’m stealing the title of this post from Atrios, but then the rest of it is recycled too. Four years. Four years. Four years. Well at least they’re not calling them Freedom Fries anymore…
Tuesday afternoon. I am attending a conference on open source software in government being held at George Washington University. I am here because my project manager is investigating the possibility of moving the system I’ve been working on for the past several years to open source software. Work on the Hubble Space Telescope will go into maintenance mode shortly, and the thinking is that the Institute doesn’t want to spend a lot of money it won’t have on software upgrades, simply because a certain vendor has a business cycle that requires you to do that. At least with open source we would have the option of making any small fixes we absolutely needed to have before the end of the mission ourselves, without breaking our systems that depend on it. The alternative is to stick to the vendor’s upgrade cycle, and pray the new versions don’t break anything in our software, or introduce new bugs and security holes.
Between conference sessions, I wander around the Foggy Bottom area, and back and forth to my hotel, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather then hassle with Washington traffic, which is a nightmare. The hotel has a nice little kitchenette, which allows me to eat reasonably well without further damaging my budget for the month. Around noon I begin the walk back to my hotel for lunch, stopping to examine a decrepit building right next to the conference hall, that I assume is one of the student dorms. It is, and I see by the bronze plaque by the door that this one is named Lafayette Hall. I read the inscription, which briefly describes the history of Marquis de Lafayette, who fought beside George Washington, taking a bullet in the process, for the freedom of a nation that was not his own, and who later attended the first commencement ceremonies of the university that bore his friend’s name, shaking the hand of each of those first graduates. While I am reading, a snarky voice in the back of my mind is saying Freedom Fries…Freedom Toast… An old friend of mine I’d had breakfast with that morning, told me a joke he’d heard about a man who, while visiting France recently, asked a random Frenchman, "Sir, can you speak German?" When the Frenchman replied that he couldn’t, the American said, "You’re welcome." I told my friend the Frenchman could just as easily have asked the American, "Sir, do you have a king?"
My hotel is somewhat oldish. My room is on the sixth floor and the elevators are small and slow. I press the button and when one finally appears, I see that there are already two businessmen inside. It’s a tight fit for three. As we go up I feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. There are some who you would never know from the look of them, to be of the right wing thuggish persuasion, and there are others who hit you with it in waves, in the cut of the clothes, the bullying posture that is as second nature as breathing, and the coldness of the face, particularly when smiling at nothing in particular. I tune them both out, pulling out from a space within me I’d almost forgotten about, a "Yes I’m a longhair, yes I know you hate my guts, and no mister establishment person sir, I really don’t give a flying fuck" attitude, close my eyes, and listen to the elevator floor counter click off the floors to mine. I toy briefly about writing a book, "Everything I know about living under Bush II, I learned from Nixon". The old elevator rises slowly. I hear one of my companions say, "I hope they don’t cancel our flight out Thursday." The other chuckles and says, "The war will be over by then."
I can just close my eyes a little, and still see that drooling jackass…
I knew right away which one was which, because I know how my own eyes scan, and because I’ve actually talked this over with others like me who draw, but also photographers too. The thing is, the human eye/brain system tends to lock straight on to what it determines is the import stuff. That’s probably because natural selection enhances a critter’s ability to size up a situation quickly. Even those of us with a creative, exploring turn of mind, when we’re just starting to learn to draw, or to do photography, need work at looking, really looking at…well…what we’re looking at…
Art teachers have noted that when beginning students attempt to draw accurate portraits, they tend to exaggerate the size of key features: eyes and mouths are too big relative to the size of the head. Trained artists learn to ignore these temptations and draw the world as it really appears. Even world-famous artists such as Leonardo da Vinci have had to resort to tricks such as looking at their subject through a divided pane of glass in order to render proportions accurately.
And it’s true. Even now there are times I will try looking at my own drawings in in a mirror, when I’m not sure I’m getting it right. But I’m convinced it’s not all a matter of training either. This would be a good experiment to run on a group of children, and then follow them into adulthood to see which ones took up art as a pursuit, to see how differently their eyes explored the world before the training set in. I’ll bet the training only enhances a tendency that is there to begin with, to rove over it all, absorbed, curious, fascinated. I remember when I was a kid, I would be drawn to even the smallest details of any scene that held my interest. The delicate colors in a sunset…or in the ripples on water, as in the photos above. I’ll bet the way my eyes roved over that photo when I first looked at it a few moments ago, wasn’t all that different from how they would have looked at it when I was a kid. The difference would only be experience. Now I know why I’m doing it. You can’t render what you’re not really seeing. You have to look. Deliberately look. That’s the training.
But here’s the inner reflex: This is a beautiful world. Look…look…there is more there then first greets the eye. See? It is richer then it first appears. Look. Look.
I guess one good way to overcome whatever it is that’s blocking you creatively, is to do something that expresses the thing that your mind got itself wrapped around. On a good week I can do, maybe two boards. Most weeks I can only do one. This weekend I did four. But they’re not quite finished yet. If I can keep this head of steam up I might get them done by tomorrow evening. All I have left to do basically is some Photoshop touch-ups, and lettering. But I decided to take a break from it tonight and go to bed. If I press it, I’ll stop seeing what I’m working on and overlook mistakes that will make me cringe later…I just know it. So I’ll call it a day now, and take it up again with fresh eyes when I get home from work tomorrow evening.
For this one thing I’m doing something I’ve almost never do, something I’ve always been afraid to do ever since high school. I’m drawing my pencils right on the board, instead of on a sheet of layout paper. Lately I’ve been feeling more confidant in my line art, and also my ability to fix mistakes in Photoshop. The layout paper has been like a crutch in some respects, in that I knew I could always skip over my mistakes, or correct them, when I did the transfer to the board. To do the transfer, I put a sheet of graphite paper down between a Bristol board and my layout paper pencils, and then I over the pencils with another sheet of layout paper and draw the line art over them. I end up with a board with faint graphite line art that I often have to touch up a bit, before starting on the inks. So that extra step of transferring the line art always meant I was drawing the line art twice. If I can just do the inks right over the pencils then I save a lot of time. On the other hand, having the abilty to store the pencils away in case I messed up the board during the inking, or just for later use somewhere else, has always been a plus.
I’ve actually been experimenting with a small light tablet I bought a few months ago. Using that I can put the pencils under a Bristol board, and then with the light switched on I can see them through the board, and theoretically just start inking. I’ve tried it a few times…the last two political cartoons I finished were done that way. And I have another Mark and Josh cartoon that’s ready for the inks that I intend to do that way. But I’m finding the light tablet a tad awkward to use. Normally, I just tape everything to a piece of Masonite that I can turn this way and that while I draw.
I won’t be able to start on Bagheera’s secondary hard disk upgrade until this thing I’m dragging out of myself is finished (because I’m still using that drive until this is done), so it looks like Tuesday evening at the earliest that I get started on that.
This afternoon the temperature rose tentatively above freezing, but mostly the sun came out and that promptly cleared the side streets of ice, and I was able to get out and get a bigger hard disk for Bagheera. I’ll put it in Monday and run the restore on the drive overnight, and we’ll see. Since it’s not the system drive, the restore shouldn’t spring any problems on me, but I’ve never had to restore a Mac disk yet either, so we’ll see.
While I was working on something at the drafting table this morning, I came up against a problem I’d faced before when it comes to drawing backgrounds. There is so much Stuff in your day-to-day environment that you sort-of know what it looks like, but when pressed to actually draw it you’re fuzzy on the details. Things like bus stop benches, trash cans, telephone poles and power transformers. You know what all these things look like generally, but not in any detailed way enough to draw them convincingly.
I remember watching a documentary on the cartoonist R. Crumb, and a passage where he described, early on in his career, driving around the city he was living in with a friend and a camera and shooting dozens and dozens of shots of nothing but common everyday cityscape stuff like transformers and street lights and storefronts and bus stops and traffic lights and such like. He said he’d been feeding off that library of background stuff all his life. Take another look at the backgrounds in his cartoons sometime, and you can see what it did for him.
So I decided to go out and start my own gallery of background trivia, for what I was working on now and future reference. When I came back I discovered I’d dropped my lens cap somewhere in the snow. Oh Dang! I figured by then some passer-by had either snatched it up for themselves, or it had been kicked somewhere or driven over by a car and I’d never find it, or never find it in one piece. I didn’t have a spare for that lens, so I waited until the camera store nearby opened and took a walk, thinking I’d just buy a new one. But just on the off chance, I re-traced my steps. I found it at a corner near where I thought I might have lost it, laying undisturbed, flat on its face in a small drift of snow and sleet. The cap was all black, and in the sunlight it must have been absorbing a little bit of heat. It had drilled its way about an inch into the snow.
"But then the sailors knelt and prayed, not all together but five or six at a time. Side by side they knelt down together . . . but there only prayed at the same time men of different faiths so that no god should hear two men praying to him at once. As soon as any one should finish his prayer, another of the same faith would take his place . . ."
"And I too felt I should pray, yet I liked not to pray to a jealous god there where the frail affectionate gods whom the heathen love were being humbly invoked; so I bethought me, instead, of Sheol Nugganoth, whom the men of the jungle have long since deserted, who is now unworhsipped and alone; and to him I prayed."
"Hell," the rabbi says, "is just like Heaven. It is a glorious banquet table spread with the finest foods. But the people in Hell are starving because they have no elbows and they cannot feed themselves."
"I see," the student says, "but in Heaven the people do have elbows?"
"No," the rabbi says, "the people in Heaven don’t have elbows either. But in Heaven, they feed each other."
Fred has a delightfully snarky photograph to go along with this blog post, titled, The Lost Tomb. It’s a tad hard to read the inscription, but the name is J. Cameron…
Well my plan was to go buy a bigger second hard disk for Bagheera today. The Big Scan (as I’m now calling it) has nearly filled the slightly less then two-hundred gigabyte one I’d bought last year. I was going to see if I could find a Western Digital half terabyte one somewhere this afternoon. But after last night’s sleet and snow all the side streets in my neighborhood are a solid sheet of ice right now. So…not…
What I really need to do is make myself a RAID-1 file server I can just shovel hard disks into as needed. But I’m waiting for the new high speed wireless protocol to be standardized (I’ll be slugging a lot of very, very large image files over the network). Apple has a nice looking new high speed AirPort base station out now, but they’ve jumped the gun on the new standard…it hasn’t been finalized yet…and I’m a tad skittish about buying into it until it is.
In the meantime I’m going to have to stop scanning now, until I can put more storage capacity online. I’m counting on the price of hard disk capacity going down, as The Big Scan progresses. Because I’ve already eaten over a-hundred gigabytes (the other hundred is taken up by my cartoon and iTunes files) and I’ve still got tons of it to go through. So far I’m in luck…looks like a half a terabyte drive should cost me about the same as what I spent on the two-hundred gig drive last year. That’s do-able. But I’ve only just started this thing.
In other news…I can sit down at my drafting table now and produce pencils. I may even have some things to post by tomorrow night…
Via The Stranger blog (SLOG)… The adventures of Reverend Ken Hutcherson, international man of theocracy…
March 16, 2007
Dear Prayer Warrior,
Thank you for praying for my call to the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. It went very well.
I was honored to receive a commission by the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives as a Special Envoy in the following areas: Adoptions, Family Values, Religious Freedom, and Medical Relief, which allowed me to meet with the Latvian government.
The purpose of the trip to Latvia was to support the Latvian government as they stand for Family Values and Religious Freedom in their country.
I met with all the Religious Leaders in Latvia except two. I also met with the Ministers of Integration, Minister of the Interior, and the Minister of Human Rights and Parliament.
The successful result of the meeting was to foster complete agreement to work together in the future to strengthen family values. All agreed to keep traditional values of marriage between a man and a woman and ensure that marriage remains an institution between a man and woman as well as ensure religious freedom within the country.
During my meeting with the American Embassy I expressed that many in the Latvian Parliament and many of the Latvian people believe that they in the American Embassy support the Homosexual agenda. I talked to them about their funding of many Homosexual groups against the wishes of the majority of the Latvian people.
Pray that my discussions will produce a change of policy. That is what we are expecting when we receive the full report that I requested from the Embassy.
Continue to pray that the new influence that God has granted through me serving as a special envoy for the White House will be effectively used as I deal with the adoption issue in the United States this next week.
Your Pastor,
Hutch
Hutcherson, you may recall, is the righteous man of the cloth who threatened Microsoft with a boycott if they didn’t stop supporting the inclusion of gay people in Washington State’s equal opportunity law. And now that it’s been passed, he’s leading a petition effort to get it repealed. He’s also been a vigorous fighter against gay marriage equality.
So the Bush administration gives him a Special Envoy commission from the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives, and he uses that to take the fight against gay equality overseas.
"The average gay couple is not interested in equality," Hutcherson says. "The average gay couple is interesting in suppressing anyone who disagrees with them."
…And you have to know that they’re not just targeting former Soviet block states. I’m convinced that the uproar over gay equality in the Anglican Church has been largely orchestrated by the American right wing. If you don’t think so too, maybe this investigative series by Jim Naughton for the newsletter of the Washington Diocese will make you think again. If Europe, and the rest of the civilized world, think that the stomping of American religious kooks has nothing to do with them, they need to get a clue. They’re already stomping inside your territory too…you just aren’t paying attention yet.
"Life begins at 66," reads an advertisement aimed at old people in Germany. But it’s not promoting orthopedic shoes — it’s for a brothel which is offering a 50-percent discount to senior citizens.
If you have to get old, Germany isn’t a bad place to do so. As well as generous state pensions, German senior citizens enjoy a host of benefits during their twilight years. Now, in addition to discounted rail travel, cut-price cinema tickets and cheap museum entry, Germany’s old folk have a new perk to take advantage of: a 50- percent discount at Germany’s largest brothel.
The brothel "Pascha" in Cologne is now offering senior citizens a 50 percent discount on sex services — but only between the hours of 12 and 5 p.m., and only upon proof of age. The offer, which many would argue beats free coffee at McDonalds, is valid for clients aged 66 and over.
I don’t see myself ever setting foot in a brothel. I don’t object to them in principle, provided that the folks working them do so of their own free will and interest and they’re not forced into it through poverty or war or crime. Otherwise as far as I’m concerned it’s a business like anything else. For some people, sex is more like recreation then romance, and that’s fine. But the point is look at how casually and matter-of-factly they’re treating human sexuality elsewhere in the civilized world.
Of course you wouldn’t start a new line of business without doing a little test marketing first…
The brothel tested the subsidized sex scheme by offering reductions once a week. The offer was so successful it has now been extended to every day. "There’s been plenty of demand and people have certainly been taking advantage of the offer," the spokesman said, adding, with a certain understatement: "Older folks are more active than you think."
See…this is why you need to read the foreign newspapers and magazines. There’s a whole ‘nother world out there isn’t there? Spiegel has been on my reading list for a while now. They’re good.
I don’t see myself ever setting foot in a brothel. But it would sure be very nice to be able to retire to a less sexually stressed out place then the country I’m living in now…
First it was the liberal Bishop of Chelmsford, John Gladwin. Now Sir Elton John is the latest to be hit by trouble over plans to visit the Caribbean island of Tobago. As we reported, Gladwin had to cancel a diocesan visit to Trinidad and Tobago after opposition from conservative Anglicans. Church leaders are now trying to ban Sir Elton from visiting in April, when he is due to play in the Plymouth music festival. According to reports running on agency wires today, it is feared that if the musician, pictured here with his partner David Furnish, even sets foot on the island his presence there might tempt local people to become gay. The Jamaican Gleaner is reporting however that the singer will be allowed to take to the stage. Apparently, a clause in Tobago’s immigration laws bans self-confessed gays from entering the country, although it is thought that none has actually been turned away.
The Archdeacon for Trinidad and Tobago, the Ven Philip Isaac, said the star’s openly gay lifestyle and the fact he had a partner did not conform to ’biblical teachings’. He said Christian principles dictated that a ‘man should not lie with a man’. The Anglican Archdeacon said: ‘The artist is one of God’s children and while his lifestyle is questionable he needs to be ministered unto. His visit to the island can open the country to be tempted towards pursuing his lifestyle.’
What a jackass. And let it be said, the man’s another Anglican Bishop on a crusade against homosexuals. I wonder if he’s so much as uttered a single breath of censure toward the violence against homosexuals now sweeping the Caribbean. Or is that just another stupid question on my part. Whatever the Episcopalians decide to do regarding the ultimatum gutter crawling haters like Ven Philip Isaac have given them, the damage is already done, the wounds already carved into the hearts of thousands of gay Christians and their families, and their friends. It’s not the Episcopalians who need to repent. The Anglican church will be repenting for this for generations.
WASHINGTON, March 14 — Asked if she believed homosexuality was immoral, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, initially said Wednesday that it was for "others to conclude," but later issued a statement saying she did not think being gay was immoral.
Her remarks came a day after Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he should not have publicly expressed his personal view that homosexual acts were immoral and akin to adultery, a position that he said was a factor in his opposition to gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military. His views had appeared in The Chicago Tribune on Monday.
A rival of Mrs. Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois was asked the same question three times on Wednesday and sidestepped the issue, according to an article in Newsday.
But a spokesman for Mr. Obama said last night that the senator disagreed with General Pace’s remarks and believed that homosexuality was not immoral.
In case you missed it, Clinton’s backtracking statement "saying she did not think being gay was immoral" was also issued by a "spokesman". Compare and contrast…
Since 1993, I have had the rich satisfaction of knowing and working with many openly gay and lesbian Americans, and I have come to realize that "gay" is an artificial category when it comes to measuring a man or woman’s on-the-job performance or commitment to shared goals. It says little about the person. Our differences and prejudices pale next to our historic challenge. Gen. Pace is entitled, like anyone, to his personal opinion, even if it is completely out of the mainstream of American thinking. But he should know better than to assert this opinion as the basis for policy of a military that represents and serves an entire nation. Let us end "don’t ask, don’t tell." This policy has become a serious detriment to the readiness of America’s forces as they attempt to accomplish what is arguably the most challenging mission in our long and cherished history.
So, dig it. After Pace babbles his mind about how homosexuality is immoral, two republicans, one a Virgina senator no less, and still in office, and the other a former senator and still a force in his party, decisively and very publicly rebuke the sentiment. Yet the current front runners for the democratic presidential nomination reflexively equivocate. And when they finally do say the right thing, they have to say it though a spokesdroid.
Teaching became a source of great satisfaction, and she earned a reputation as one of the best. It was in this capacity that the invitation came to conduct research with homosexuals. A very bright student in one of Hooker’s classes (1945) sought to extend the relationship outside of class, and in so doing met Hooker’s husband (she had married Donn Caldwell, a freelance writer, in 1941). As a couple, they were invited to social occasions with her student and his friends.
After several years, the former student began urging Hooker to conduct research with them. She finally did some exploratory research with them. However, her life had changed, including a divorce in 1947, so the project was put on ice. She was married again in 1951 in London, England to Edward Niles Hooker, a distinguished professor of English at UCLA.
In 1953, Hooker applied to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for a six-month grant to study the adjustment of nonclinical homosexual men and a comparable group of heterosexual men. If the study section thought it worthwhile, she would pursue it. The reply was not long in coming. John Eberhart, chief of the Grants Division, flew out to spend a day with her. The application, she was told, was quite extraordinary, especially because it was then the height of the McCarthy era. The legal penalties for homosexual behavior were severe. The psychiatric diagnosis was severe and pervasive emotional disorder. There were simply no scientific data about nonimprisoned, nonpatient homosexuals. Eberhart said, "We are prepared to give you the grant, but you may not receive it, and you won’t know why and we won’t know why." Not only did she receive it, but NIMH continued the renewal until 1961, when she received the Research Career Award.
Hooker’s research (1957) demonstrating that expert clinical judges could not distinguish the projective test protocols of nonclinical homosexual men from a comparable group of heterosexual men, nor were there differences in adjustment ratings, was validated soon thereafter by other investigators. Not until 1973, however, did the American Psychiatric Association delete homosexuality from its diagnostic handbook. Meanwhile, the gay and lesbian liberation movement in the 1960s took cognizance of these research findings. It was a source of great satisfaction for Hooker to have contributed in some measure to this new freedom and to a partial lifting of the stigma. Her life was immeasurably enriched by the research and by friendships with men and women across the entire spectrum of occupations and life styles.
Fifty years since Hooker next year. Fifty-three years since Kinsey. Over thirty since the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as a category of mental illness. The science has been staring people in the face now for half a century. But the story of homosexual people, throughout the human experience, has been there for millennia for all our brothers and sisters to see clearly, plainly, unmistakeably. From the poets and story tellers of ancient Greece to the stories of countless gay men and women alive today, our essential humanity is there for anyone to see. But to see it, you have to want to.
And there’s the moral issue. Does the truth matter? If General Pace fails because he cannot see the people for the homosexuals, and whatever dogma or prejudice it is that’s telling him they are behaving in an immoral fashion regardless of what he can either see with his own two goddamned eyes, or learn any time he’s willing to take a stroll outside the door of his cheap conceits, then what of Clinton and Obama, and all the other cowardly democrats who would rather duck the issue then address it straight on? If the context is a question about the morality of homosexuality, and you believe that it is possible for a gay person to live decent, honorable, moral lives according to their nature, that they can have completely healthy and moral intimate relationships according to their nature, then how moral is it not to plainly say so?
Does the truth matter? You want to know why the republican machine keeps winning the "values" argument it isn’t because anyone with a spine is addressing their beliefs head-on. It’s because by equivocating they’re telling the voters they don’t think the truth matters. It’s one thing to say that we are not Gods, that we are not perfect, that we do not have the perfect God’s eye view of reality, of right and wrong. It’s another to act like you don’t care, or that it doesn’t matter.
Democrats need to stop being afraid to address moral questions. When did a political party that, at least since Roosevelt, championed the common working citizen, children, the needy, the environment, and the ideal of liberty and justice for all, suddenly loose its moral confidence? And in the face of what? A party dedicated to the ideal that greed is good? Rape the environment now because Jesus is coming later? The party of corpses floating in New Orleans? The party of lying the nation into war? The party of sexual purity for everyone but itself? Is this what they’re letting bully them into silence on the issue of the rights of gay people …?
Here’s a summary of Gingrich’s family life: 1) Gingrich marries his high school teacher, Jackie, who was seven years his senior; 2) Jackie puts Gingrich through college and she works hard to get him elected to the House in 1978 (Gingrich won partly because his campaign claimed that his Democratic opponent would neglect her family if elected — at that time it was common knowledge that Gingrich was straying); 3) Shortly after being elected, Gingrich separated from his wife — announcing the separation in the hospital room where Jackie was recovering from cancer surgery (the divorce was final in 1981); Jackie Gingrich and her children had to depend on alms from her church because Gingrich didn’t pay any child support; 3) Six months after the divorce, Gingrich, then 38, married Marianne Ginther, 30; 4) "In May 1999, however, Gingrich [55] called Marianne [48] at her mother’s home. After wishing the 84-year-old matriarch happy birthday, he told Marianne that he wanted a divorce." This was eight months after Marianne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; 5) In 2000, Gingrich, 57, married ex-congressional aide Callista Bisek, 34, with whom he was having a relationship while married to Marianne.
Its grotesque, watching the democrats fritter away the moral high ground to a pack of thugs who would have been gangsters had they not chosen to go into politics instead. The war and President Junior’s botching of it gives them a chance to forge a new governing majority, but they’ll loose it all again if they keep equivocating on questions of values and morality, and allow the republicans to once again define themselves as the champions of virtue and godliness. The answer to that question, "Do you believe homosexuality is immoral", should have been: "No. Adultery is immoral. Leaving your children destitute is immoral. Divorcing your wife after you found out she has multiple sclerosis is immoral. Morality isn’t a matter of what sex your partner is. It’s a matter of how you treat them. And if you can’t treat your spouse decently, if you can’t treat your own children decently, then who would you? This country can entrust itself to a government comprised entirely of homosexuals, all in faithful, loving same sex relationships, more then it dare one cheating wife abusing child neglecting heterosexual."
Oh Baía, when twilight is deep in the sky, Baiá
Someone that I long to see, keeps haunting my memory
And so the loneliness deep in my heart calls to you, calls to you!
I’ve been looking for the recording of this from the soundtrack to Disney’s The Three Caballeros ever since I first watched it. The sensuousness of the music, combined with the lush imagery I saw on screen just riveted me. I think this was when I got my wish to visit Brazil someday. But Disney’s release policy regarding its soundtracks has always mystified me. Sometimes they release the original version, sometimes a bastardized re-recording that just plain stinks. To my knowledge they’ve never released this bit of simply beautiful music anywhere, ever. Not on LP, not on CD. I’ve heard other recordings of this piece, by other artists, and while some of them come close, none of them quite hit the mark the Disney version does. It needs that rich brass sound in the slow sultry beat beneath the singer.
But then last night I realized that I had the film on laserdisc anyway, and via Final Vinyl I could rip a copy off for my iPod that was as good as if I’d gotten it from CD. I’ve been enjoying it since last night when I loaded it into iTunes and went for a late night walk, cigar in hand like Joe Carioca, reminiscing about a beautiful place I’ve never been. Sorry Mr. DisneyCorp sir, but I can’t buy anything from you that you don’t sell.
The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and — though the principle was never clearly stated — permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party’s efforts were largely successful.
He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten — nearly eleven years since they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For days at a time he was capable of forgetting that he had ever been married. They had only been together for about fifteen months. The Party did not permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases where there were no children.
Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. Very early in her married life he had decided — though perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people — that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. ‘The human sound-track’ he nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing — sex.
As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidlty of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible. But even then he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused this. They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So the performance continued to happen, once a week quite regulariy, whenever it was not impossible. She even used to remind him of it in the morning, as something which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten. She had two names for it. One was ‘making a baby’, and the other was ‘our duty to the Party’ (yes, she had actually used that phrase). Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round. But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they parted.
…
He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of Katharine’s white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the Party. Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years? But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The women of the Party were all alike. Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them. His reason told him that there must be exceptions, but his heart did not believe it. They were all impregnable, as the Party intended that they should be. And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.
"1984" – George Orwell
If the theocrats every take total control, this book will be one of the first to take the express ride straight in the bonfire, along with those of us who have taken it’s message about totalitarianism to heart. Never mind how Heather Has Two Mommies glorifies homosexuality…Orwell got it dead right about why totalitarians have waged war on that most elemental, essential part of the human experience: Desire…and especially desire which brings people together into a bond of human love. Reading it, you really see how theocracy is no different in kind from the Stalinism Orwell was warning against. For all their bellyaching about the primacy of the family, and so-called family values, the dirty truth is that the fundamentalism that animates the American Christianist movement hates the bond of human love that is the bedrock of family life, as much as any secular police state that ever existed. And there is no better place to see that hatred, ironically enough, then in the essential message of the ex-gay movement:
Sex is not about desire. It is not about love. Sex is about duty to God. Replace ‘God’ with, ‘The Party’ and you see it all, with sickening clarity.
There are many powerful stories out there about men and women whom God has delivered from the gay lifestyle. It touches the heart and certainly glorifies God when we see these people getting married and leading godly lives free of homosexuality.
But in all honesty, what about the rest of us who deal with this issue and haven’t come to our "happy ending" yet? What about those of us who continue to struggle with same-sex attraction (SSA), even after choosing to follow Christ? We’re caught in a sort of identity limbo, unsure whether we can or even should hope to experience heterosexual desire, get married and start a family someday.
Ensley has an answer for them…but first he has to slay a strawman…
"But, Mike," you might say, "they’re allowed to follow their feelings and urges, and marry whoever they want."
Um, no they’re not. Every man deals with feelings and urges that pull him away from God’s explicit will for our sexuality. Or did you think other Christian men’s sex drives always cooperate with them in abstaining until marriage, and then staying faithful? They too struggle with wandering and lustful eyes, curiosity about other people, the fleeting infatuations. They have to crucify the flesh daily, just like you and me.
But this is dishonest. The essential cruelty of the prison fundamentalism puts homosexuals into is that they are forbidden from having that intimate body and soul love that it seems to be willing to grant to heterosexuals. A heterosexual can at least marry and have sex with someone they are naturally attracted to sexually. Sure, they may be tempted to stray from the rigid boundaries imposed upon them by their church. But at least within those boundaries the possibility of intimate romantic love still exists…or seems to. But for homosexuals it is simply not a possibility.
In recent years, ex-gay rhetoric has seemingly come to a grudging acknowledgment of this fact. All the promises of change and healing via prayer just don’t work. Rather then continuing to beat these people over the head about their lack of faith, ex-gay rhetoric began to hold chastity (celibacy) as a virtue that gay people could aspire to, in lieu of the impossible change. But this is a barren promise. A life of struggle against ones inner nature, achieving nothing more noble then an empty desolate loneliness in exchange for, maybe, grudging acceptance in the pews.
Ensley wants gay youth to know that they’re not being singled out unfairly. The inner desolation they are experiencing is in fact, the price of admission that heterosexuals must pay too, for the glory of The Party God. Marriage is not about love…it is about duty. Go ahead and marry someone of the opposite sex Ensley tells them. The fact is that you shouldn’t expect to desire your mate.
Stop obsessing about how much you will (or won’t) enjoy heterosexual sex
You’ve thought about it, and so have I. What if I don’t enjoy sex with my spouse? What if I still want to have sex with other men (or women, if you’re a woman)? The skeptics certainly say all the time that we "ex-gays" only have sexually frustrated lives ahead of us.
We often say the opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality, it’s holiness. That means God is calling us away from a me-centered life, including a me-centered sexuality. We’ve spent a lot of time programming ourselves through fantasy, masturbation, pornography and encounters to be utterly selfish with our sexuality. Marriage is the absolute antithesis of that.
The Bible tells us that once we are married our body actually belongs to our spouse. If you haven’t lived with that attitude in singleness, it’s not going to come naturally once you say your vows. The best way to be ready is by following this other Biblical command: to offer your body as a living sacrifice to God, because it ultimately belongs to Him.
People often ask me if I have sexual fantasies about women now, because that’s what the world would consider change. But God wants me to change not into a man who still wraps himself up in self-absorbed fantasy, but one who’s ready to put my wife before myself — and put Him first.
Afraid you won’t enjoy the sex? Well, if your priority is your own satisfaction and the living out of your overly-developed obsessions, no, you won’t enjoy the intimacy of sex within marriage. You know what? Neither would an "ever-straight" with the same mindset. They might be able to marry according to their worldly desires, but it will never fulfill the endless hunger of selfishness. Real closeness grows out of commitment to a person, and following God’s will.
Don’t worry; sex God’s way will be the best.
Again…replace "God" with "The Party" there it is…in all its sickening, stomach churning human hating glory. The fundamentalist ideal of family life: two people having ritual sex for the sole purpose of making babies, without regard for the intimate needs of one another, or even their own feelings for the person they have in their arms. What does it mean to put your wife first, if the act of taking her into your arms is barren of any real desire for her? What does it mean for her to love you, if she’s supposed to regard your feelings as irrelevant? The grotesque answer is: the essential emptiness of the act is proof of their mutual devotion. But not to each other. By their willingness to fuck someone they have no desire for, or to be fucked by someone who has no desire for them, they are proving their devotion to The Party God. They are meat, enacting a few brief, barren orgasms utterly devoid of healthy human desire in a way that even the most random of sexual assignations in a gay bathhouse, or a highway rest stop, could not hope to sink to. The next time you hear a fundamentalist nutcase yap, yap, yapping about how homosexuality is barren, remember that this is what they consider righteous.
And this is the ideal, make no mistake, for heterosexuals too. Whether or not you actually desire the person in your arms does not matter. Time and again you hear this from the talking heads of the religious right. Marriage is not about love. It is not about desire. What matters is duty. To God. To the Party…
"I could have stood it if it hadn’t been for one thing," he said. He told her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week. "She hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it. She used to call it — but you’ll never guess."
"Our duty to the Party," said Julia promptly.
"How did you know that?"
"I’ve been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can never tell; people are such hypocrites."
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:
"When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?"
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.
GILLETTE, Wyo. A lesbian couple in Gillette have been told they can’t receive communion at the church they’ve attended since 1998, in part because they publicly opposed a bill that would have barred Wyoming from recognizing gay marriages. Leah Vader and Lynne Huskinson have attended Saint Matthew’s Catholic Church since 1998, and were married two years ago in Canada. Earlier this year, when the Legislature considered a bill that would have barred Wyoming from recognizing such marriages, the two said the bill amounted to discrimination.
Last week, they got a letter from the Reverend Cliff Jacobson of Saint Matthew’s, telling them they can no longer receive communion, in part because of their public position.
Jacobson says the church reaches out to homosexuals, but that it must do so within its own moral structure. He says the Cheyenne Diocese played a role in the decision to bar the women from receiving communion.
(emphasis mine…) Yeah the church reaches out to homosexuals. With a clenched fist. This is just the first crack of the whip. They’ve been hinting for years now that they’ll start using communion, and possibly even excommunication, as a way of punishing dissent. It’ll come down on the gay people in the pews first, because we’re the easy target. But heterosexuals who don’t vote the way Pope Ratzinger dictates, or who are politically active in politically incorrect ways, will be next. Never doubt that.
I stepped outside a few moments ago for a cigar walk, and my little side street was full of cop cars. There were police on the front porch of a neighbor’s house. A couple I know, a nice friendly and cheerful, Quaker couple had apparently had a fight, and a bad one. One of them, I don’t know which, was taken away in a police van.
They have two small children. I can’t imagine what they’re going through right now. When my own parents divorced, the fireworks happened sometime between when I was 2 and 3. When I was older and they were seeing each other again, I never saw them fight. They always seemed close to each other. I have no other memories of them together, where they weren’t happy with each other. I’m so grateful for that.
I tend to idealize couples the I know. They have something I was never able to find for myself. I put their relationships up on a pedestal. I forget sometimes in my own loneliness that they often struggle too, even having what they have. I see things like this and it just hurts so much inside. These were the last two I’d have ever thought would have police stepping in. I want love to succeed. I want them to be happy. Its such a lonely world.
The cops are gone now. I saw another couple come to their door and were let in. Friends I suppose…I’ve never seen them here before. I hope whatever it was they get it sorted out eventually. Its such a lonely world.
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