I updated my depressing blog post of yesterday to include something that strikes me as an extra added burden on late fifties gay male dating. It’s a situation that will hopefully be done with, or mostly so, beyond my generation of gay folk. It’s better now for gay people in a lot of ways and especially for gay kids, even accounting for the fact that bullying still takes a frightful toll. But millennials who reach their fifties and suddenly find themselves tossed back into the dating pool should be in one that is mostly as full as it should be of randomly available older gay singles. That isn’t the case with my generation. A lot of gay guys in the general vicinity of my age are still deeply closeted because that’s what they felt they needed to be in order to survive when they were young men back in the 70s.
Being a homosexual back when I was a gay teenager was worse then being a murderer, worse then being a rapist, worse even then being a communist. A lot of us took that to heart and never found the inner strength to live openly and honestly because the risks were just too much, the pressure was just too much. So a lot of us put on a mask of heterosexuality back then. It was a matter of survival. And as they grew older they lived that life even if it wasn’t the life their soul was meant to live.
Now some of them have wives, some have kids, and they just can’t leave that life without doing a lot of damage to a lot of people around them. And if at this late stage of that one chance for a decent life you get, they find themselves looking in a mirror and knowing it could have been different…harder, more of a struggle initially, but better, more honorable, more decent…they have to ask themselves if getting their self respect back, their honor back, is really worth the toll it is going to take on a lot of people, not just themselves. And a lot of them are simply going to choose to go to their grave wearing that mask and I can’t find it in my heart to judge them for it.
And what that means for those of us of this generation who took the risk and lived honest open lives is our dating pool is a lot smaller then it should be and if we are still single at this age we’re basically fighting against really horrible odds on top of the fact that gay males are a minority to begin with. And that can’t be helped. It just is what it is.
Millennials…don’t be looking at lonely older gay guys like me in fear that this is your future. I am not your future. I am your past. For gay guys of my generation it will always be a time before Stonewall.
I am grocery shopping and paused between isles with my shopping cart, when a middle aged (I think…I didn’t get a good look at her) woman strides quickly past and says “Nice ass”. Startled I snap out of my hunter-gatherer mindset and look up. She doesn’t look back, just walks quickly away and down another isle. Well I’m gay, so I don’t follow.
It’s nice to be reminded from time to time that a guy physically like me can be desirable…at least to some small segment of the human population. Once some years ago while I was waiting to be seated at a restaurant in Kayenta, a young Navajo (I think…Kayenta is in the Navajo reservation) woman actually put a hand on my butt as she walked quickly by. Had I the kind of love life other people have I’d probably take offense. But starved as I am at this late stage in my life for any kind of romance, burdened by the kinds of doubts about my desirability you would naturally have in the autumn of a life spent single, I take some heart when I get those, like the starving man suddenly presented with a dry loaf of bread. I see how others get complements on their desirability and I know I get them a lot less, and there are just more heterosexual women out there then gay males so it isn’t unusual that I’d hear it more often from that direction then the one I’d really thrill to get it from. But it’s a two edged knife. On the one hand it’s a comfort to know your Use By date isn’t past just yet. On the other, you’re still single and you have no prospects.
I’m gay. As perfect a Kinsey 6 as they come. What seems to confuse a lot of my gay friends is I am not about über masculine guys, which is unfortunate in that the only time I ever seem to get that “nice ass” complement from another guy it’s a bear and I am not about bear. I’ve had gay friends ask me outright if I’m not actually Bi because…well you’ve probably seen the random sketches of beautiful guys I’ve posted here. Here’s one I did recently that I put up on Facebook…
One gay friend cracked about this one…
…that he was one estrogen shot away from a job a Hooters. Thing of it is, I thought I was sketching a fairly butch sort of guy. Gay obviously, in the sense that a straight guy would never call attention to his body in the same way a gay guy does let alone strike that kind of pose. But as far as I can tell I drew a guy there. Ah…but his hair… Yes…it’s a tad long isn’t it. Must be a girly boy then. Maybe I relied too much on the basketball shirt with the University of Maryland insignia on it to make the attitude of the subject plain. On the other hand, there is a strain of human male…I’ve seen them both gay and straight…that seem to feel nothing but contempt for other males who aren’t 200 percent über masculine. Get A Haircut you goddamned fairy…
Here’s the thing: that period of time when we walk out of adolescence into our young adulthood really leaves its mark on your libido.
I came of age in a period of time in America when guys felt free to wear their hair long and their jeans tight to the body and low around the waste and be sexy and show off in a way they just can’t now without being terrified of getting labeled GAY, and I guess I just glommed onto that look as an ideal of male beauty. But there was more then just eye candy to it because with that look usually came a mindset that I found very agreeable to the soul. The über masculine guys my age back then were all either dumb jocks or Nixon republicans who I didn’t want anything to do with. The longhairs more often then not, struck me as beautiful on the inside as outside. Some of them made my heart skip a beat. In high school I hung out with the longhaired art geeks for half my day and the longhaired techno geeks the other half and it was bliss. That was my perfect world. But it didn’t last.
And I think regrettably my libido is still living in that world that does not exist anymore. And really, when I think about that time logically and rationally, I would not want to go back. It wasn’t the best place for a gay kid. Lots of eye candy yes, but you didn’t dare tell anyone you found them desirable or you’d get packed off to a mental ward.
I find myself thinking often at night now, alone in my house, that if only that world had been as accepting of gay kids, as incomplete and spotty as acceptance nowadays is, as this one, maybe I wouldn’t still be single. You see, I was always about finding The One and the problem is the longer you go without finding them the more your social group becomes people who are still in the singles scene because that’s where they always wanted to be and they just don’t get you.
A few years ago I found myself at a new bar my gay friends down in D.C. decided to try out as a change of scenery. With us was a guy who was somewhat new to the group…”D”. D was someone I was always happy to see join us. I wasn’t attracted to him in a romantic sense and I figure neither was he to me or else he’d have probably said something. But at a deep down in the heart place I sensed we were two of a kind. Well practically the moment I walked into that bar my jaw dropped at the sight of one of the bartenders. The friends I’d socialized for decades with simply sat and watched my rapture and confusion as they always did, waiting I guess for me to finally get up and do something about it. D, seeing my eyes never left this guy did something no one else had ever done for me before. He stood beside me at the bar and ordered something from the beautiful bartender and asked him his name where I could hear it given. And once given D looked aside at me with a smile and a nod…
There you go…
It was enough. Instantly I struck up a conversation with the guy. Well, nothing came of it, but it was a chance, small as it was and I was touched by the gesture on the part of D. It wasn’t until some time later, heartbroken at how longtime gay friends let an opportunity for me to meet a guy who, it was said, might actually have been a very good match for me, wither on the vine and die like my desperate loneliness mattered not one wit to any of them, that I really saw that moment with D in that bar for what it was. D and I really were two of a kind. He eventually found his soulmate and dropped out of the happy hour group and I miss seeing him. But I’m happy for him too. And I understand what has happened to me a little better now. For romantics like myself, the social opportunities at this late stage in life are mostly with other singles who are just fine in the singles scene and that’s why they’re still there, not why you’re still there. And thus time passes, the universe expands, and you end up older, less desirable, searching for love in a rapidly depleting dating pool situated in a minority of a minority, surrounded by a lot of very very nice people who just get a little confused as to why, if you’re attracted to some guy you see, you would need to know his name.
What…you’re not on GRINDR? And so they won’t get his name for you when they see your jaw dropping or even bother trying to introduce you or get the two of you together because the mindset is you just go over to him and say “My place or yours” and get it on and be done with it and then on to the next guy and if that guy turns out to be The One all well and good but if not no bother here comes the next guy. They just don’t get how that love thing mixes with that libido thing inside of you and how that keeps you behaving differently from how they would when they see an attractive guy. They just don’t get how you don’t simply walk up to someone who is making your heart skip a beat and offer them a quick fuck in the backroom because that is simply how it’s done in the singles scene. And don’t try to tell me it’s any different for heterosexuals either because I’ve watched that singles scene too and the only difference between them I can discern is the gay singles scene is less hypocritical and more to the point. Backrooms instead of cheap motels then. It saves time and money.
But at least heterosexuals have a bigger potential dating pool, and live for that matter in a culture that for all its hypocrisy at least somewhat supports love and romance among heterosexuals, if not homosexuals. It’s better now for younger gay guys, but you carry those first years of your dating life with you always it seems. When I was seventeen and just coming out to myself it would still be a few more years before the APA decided kids like me weren’t mentally ill and decades before I could lie down with a guy I loved and not risk being thrown into jail in many states. And a problem I run into time and again is a lot of very nice guys roughly my own age are either still in the closet or deep in denial, having spent a lifetime masquerading as heterosexual for that career, for that share of the American dream we were all told we could have when we were kids. It’s what a lot of us had to do to survive. And now they have wives and maybe kids and they’re in that life and there is no getting out of it without a lot of pain and damage to everyone around them and they have to ask themselves at this late stage in their lives is if it’s worth it, or do they just go to their grave wearing the mask. When I was a young man I was determined to avoid that fate for myself. I came out to friends who were mostly accepting, and in the workplace where I felt I could not be openly gay I simply refused to invent imaginary girlfriends let alone actually date girls and build a faux heterosexual life around me as a wall against my inner self. So now I’m in my late fifties and I can say I have always lived the honest life and I am proud of that, but I’m still single and consigned to a pool of other singles of my age group made smaller then it should be for all the guys my age who Still after all these years cannot bring themselves to live openly as gay for reasons I cannot find it in my heart to judge. I feel some nights as if I never had a chance. For gay people of a certain age it seems, it will always be a time before Stonewall.
So at the autumn of your life you are gay and single and your prospects are doubly limited because gay males are simply a minority and in your age group openly gay males are an even smaller minority, and your bar pals solution to your loneliness will always be to just get out and meet people but what they’re really saying is go out and trick because that’s meeting people for them. And they just don’t understand and never will how meeting people is a slightly different process if what you want to come of it is a relationship and not a random fuck in the night with someone whose name you don’t need to know anyway.
The others, your kind, are mostly settled down now. If you had a spouse the two of you could probably still socialize with them but as you are single you represent a world they understandably wish to keep at a safe distance. So you are left to the “scene” and you don’t belong there and you never belonged there but in your youth it was all there was and now it is all that keeps you from going mad from total social isolation and so you keep going back, keep saying to yourself that maybe tonight I’ll find The One. But you know he isn’t there and even if he was your friends would be oblivious and unsupportive. And the “nice ass” you occasionally get from random strangers still elicits a vague hope within you that you are still in the game, but that hope is only an echo from a distant world whose ship you missed long, long ago.
[Updated a tad to clarify some things that I felt needed it.]
This is mostly a growl at a certain someone who bellyaches about how I overdo the packaging of the randoms gifts I send his way, which I am posting here (and on Facebook) even though he doesn’t bother reading my blog (So He Claims) or do Facebook (So He Claims) because I just need to vent about the unfairness of it all. I do not overpack and thereby “waste postage” as has been claimed.
So I bought two (count ’em) +1 diopters for my Nikon SLRs to replace one I lost at Disney World a few weeks ago. If you’ve never seen a diopter for the old all mechanical film SLRs they’re about the size of a dime and they correct for…er…older eyes. Nikon diopters, unlike the Canon diopters apparently, have this tendency to unscrew themselves and drop off the eyepiece. If you’re lucky you hear the delicate little ‘clink’ as it hits the pavement and if you’re not you just walk blithely on without realizing you’re walking away from a piece of hardware that nobody makes anymore and is hard-to-find on the used market without which you will have serious difficulty seeing and focusing on your subjects.
So I was lucky enough to find and buy two (count ’em) more +1 diopters for my Nikons. I bought them both at the same time from the same online company. They came in separate packages, one of which was a small bubble pack envelope which was about right for something the size of an SLR diopter. The other one came packaged as follows…
Now stop complaining about how I pack things. In the grand scheme of things I am actually very sensible about how I pack gifts I’d like my friends to have. Particularly when it’s breakable…like a couple of latte mugs. I appreciate and share your waste not, want not attitude, (though probably not to the degree a German would) but if you’d opened a box from me that was full of broken glass you might have gotten the wrong impression.
Kerry Egan, a hospice chaplain, admits that, much of the time, it’s not God:
Mostly, they talk about their families: about their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters. They talk about the love they felt, and the love they gave. Often they talk about love they did not receive, or the love they did not know how to offer, the love they withheld, or maybe never felt for the ones they should have loved unconditionally…
Why is it you might wonder, that thoughts of death and darkness seem to prevail at this time of year. The bitter eternal chill of wintertime? The deathly silence of the long dark nights? Hahahahaha… No, silly. This is the time of year in which we pause before the graveyard of life’s most magical dream to try once more in abject futility to bury it once and for all. Valentine’s Day is coming!
The signs are Everywhere!
From: FTD Flowers <FTD@email.ftd.com>
Reply-to: FTD@email.ftd.com
Message-ID: <15857985932.1328433753103@dc1.prod>
Subject: SWEET! From $19.99: Roses with FREE Chocolates*
Shop Best Sellers for Valentine's Day
Believe in Love Bouquet with Free Chocolate STARTING AT $19.99
True Love Valentine Rose Bouquet regular $39.99 SALE $20 Off $19.99
Romantic Dreams Valentine's Day Bouquet regular $49.99 NOW STARTING AT $34.99
Be Still My Heart Valentine Bamboo regular $39.99 NOW STARTING AT $19.99
*Exceptions Apply:
Don’t they Always? Well I’m here to tell you, Nothing says Love more then a gift of free chocolates, unless its the text message from your soulmate informing you that they’re seeing someone else now, and would greatly appreciate it if you stopped leaving messages on their answering machine.
Will there be a Fifth Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest this year? Well…I don’t know… I mean…you’re very nice. But…let’s think about it before we take it to the next level. I’ll call you sometime.
This post is going to repeat a lot of verbiage from a post I made here nearly two years ago, but it’s about a recurring theme I see in our struggle. That theme raised it’s head and laughed at me this morning, while reading a post over at Box Turtle Bulletin. There, poster Rob Tisinai writes about an email he got from Maggie Gallagher…
I got a fundraising email from Maggie Gallagher the other day. It’s unbelievably long (as in, I can’t believe she expects people to read this whole thing). One sentence jumped out at me before I gave up on the piece.
Are two men pledged in a sexual union really a marriage?
Personally I’d answer, No.
Which would be the correct answer from Gallagher’s point of view. Tisinai goes on to rephrase the question in terms that acknowledge same-sex couples might actually be in love, and avers that this is something she knows she cannot admit because it undercuts her entire argument against same-sex marriage.
I don’t think her argument is about same-sex marriage. I don’t think any of them really give a good goddamn about marriage. What they’re adamant about is that homosexuals aren’t really human…that Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. It isn’t about marriage at all. What marriage represents to the homophobes is the final barrier to admitting that homosexuals are fully human and capable of experiencing all the higher emotions of love and devotion and commitment that heterosexuals do…that we are not, as Dr. Laura once famously put it, biological errors, or as you can hear thumped from pulpits all over the bible belt, demon possessed hell bound abominations in the eyes of god.
North Carolina activist Patrick Wooden has become a favorite of groups like the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, and most recently joined Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality at a rally denouncing the Southern Poverty Law Center. On a recent appearance on LaBarbera’s radio show, Wooden called homosexuality a “wicked, deviant, immoral, self-destructive, anti-human sexual behavior” and should make people “literally gag.” Wooden added that gay men have “to wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels” by their “40s or 50s” as a result of “what happens to the male anus.”
When you hear them yap, yap, yapping about the sanctity of marriage, what they’re saying is homosexuals are some sort of sub-human…things…that copulate with just about anything handy whether it’s a person or a horse or a cell phone. To lift what homosexuals do to the level of heterosexual love and commitment then, is a profane act of defilement. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Be it with each other or…cell phones.
Which is to say, we do not love. Love is something fully human individuals experience. The homosexual experiences no such thing. That is an article of belief more central to the faith of modern fundamentalists then the resurrection.
Back in April of 2010, I read this by then newly out Christian musician Jennifer Knapp back in an interview in Christianity Today…
Q: So why come out of the closet, so to speak?
Knapp: I’m in no way capable of leading a charge for some kind of activist movement. I’m just a normal human being who’s dealing with normal everyday life scenarios. As a Christian, I’m doing that as best as I can. The heartbreaking thing to me is that we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex that may be, and hold on to their faith. It’s a hard notion. It will be a struggle for those who are in a spot that they have to choose between one or the other. The struggle I’ve been through—and I don’t know if I will ever be fully out of it—is feeling like I have to justify my faith or the decisions that I’ve made to choose to love who I choose to love.
[Emphasis mine…] The problem after all isn’t sex, it’s love. But asking people to acknowledge that same-sex couples love is precisely the problem. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… People sitting in the pews side-by-side with their gay neighbors aren’t asking them to choose between their love and their faith. When they look at same-sex couples they don’t see love at all…merely sex. They are “struggling with homosexuality”. The bedrock prejudice insists, absolutely insists, that is all there is to same-sex couples. Empty, barren, transient lust.
As NOM board member Orson Scott Card once said, gay couples are just playing dress-up…
“However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were…”
“They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes…”
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… There’s the problem. Look at it if you have the nerve. This isn’t about sex. That empty barren, perverted lust is not what makes them angry. What makes them angry is any suggestion that homosexuals do, in fact, experience love the same way heterosexuals do. And it makes them absolutely livid.
It’s often argued that gay couples cannot rise to the level of marriage because they don’t produce children, and marriage is mostly about family life. But this argument is a sham. And it mirrors another sham argument often heard in conservative religious communities, that being homosexual is not a sin, only engaging in homosexual acts is. If only the homosexuals just didn’t have sex, they could be welcomed into the kingdom of Heaven too…just like the rest of us. But heterosexual couples, medically incapable of having sex, are as welcome to marriage as they are the Kingdom and nobody in either group is saying that same-sex couples can marry as long as they don’t have sex.
The heterosexual couple who stick together even if they are denied a sex life are seen as vindicating the power of love. That is why sterility among heterosexuals is no barrier to marriage. But same-sex couples somehow defile the institute of marriage with their very presence, whether they bring children into it (via adoption) or not, whether they can have sex or not. And that is because homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.
It’s not about children. It’s not about family life. It’s not even about heterosexuality. What homosexuals steal from people like Orson Scott Card is the idea that only heterosexuals love. All arguments to the contrary, what this fight is about, Exactly, is love, and who can be allowed to love and be loved, and who cannot. Marriage is love’s sanctuary, a sacred place where lovers can find shelter, protection, support. Letting homosexuals, who are incapable of love, into it defiles that sanctuary, turning it from a sacred place into a brothel.
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… In 1983, Sharon Kowalski suffered severe brain injuries in a motorcycle accident leaving her unable to care for herself. Her lover, Karen Thompson, with whom she had exchanged wedding bands and shared a house, had to fight a long and bitter legal battle with Kowalski’s parents, who refused to allow Thompson any contact at all with their daughter. When Sharon, with difficulty, typed her wishes to go back home with Karen on a keyboard provided by a doctor, her parents took the keyboard away. At one point, Donald Kowalski, Sharon’s father, asked a reporter in exasperated frustration “What does that woman want with my daughter…she’s in diapers!” For almost nine years Thompson fought it out in court with Kowalski’s parents, refusing to let the woman she loved be condemned to life in a nursing home where she would be kept isolated from the world outside and denied any therapy that would have allowed her to communicate her wishes to be taken back home to Karen. When she finally won, Donald Kowalski called her an animal.
What does that woman want with my daughter… A same-sex couple who cannot have sex would be, if unrepentant nonetheless, ineligible for the Kingdom, let alone marriage. It’s not about the Act, if not engaging in the Act makes no difference. Their crime is that they love, and love is not permitted to homosexuals.
Antioch Bible Church pastor Ken Hutcherson didn’t sit in the same room as two gay people to debate marriage equality. But he did call into the Seattle Channel studio where gay people were present for a debate on same-sex marriage.
And of course, Pastor Hutcherson went there: “If this law is passed, what is going to happen? Now ask your guests in the studio. Do they believe that if they change the definition of marriage being between one man and one woman, what is going to stop two men one woman, two women one man, one man against a horse, one many with a boy, one man with anything?“
We must be animals. Not sinners in need of salvation, but animals. Why? So we can be their scapegoats. The right wing politician who goes hiking the Appalachian trail with his mistress while his wife and children wonder where the hell he went. The religious right preacher who gets caught visiting prostitutes. The conservative moralizer who gets caught gambling. The problem isn’t that we are moral cheats, the problem is acceptance of homosexuality. Homosexuality is destroying the family and society, not our own failures of moral character. Probably it is also responsible for earthquakes and hurricanes.
Jennifer Knapp didn’t choose love over faith, but love over fame because there was no other way. Karen Thompson fought for nine years to free her beloved because there was no other way. The gay civil rights struggle is not a fight over scripture. It has nothing to do with faith. It is not about sex. It is a fight over the right, the essential human need, to love and be loved. Because love can overcome any obstacle, endure any hardship, hold on to any hope no matter how distant and faint. Because love can move mountains. Because the one thing you never want the scapegoat to do is move mountains.
No Senator…Actually, You’re The Threat To Civilization.
A few days ago Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland, submitted a bill to the legislature to legalize same-sex marriage. Hate groups like NOM have been preparing for this day. So, in our own way I suppose, have my fellow gay and gay supportive Marylanders.
I do not look forward to the brutal, bitter, torrent of hate mongering that is to come. I sure don’t look forward to having to know, as the signs start popping up on front lawns and the bumper stickers appear, which of the neighbors on my block want to cut my ring finger off. My neighbors are generally a good sort of folk I’ve found in the years I’ve lived at Casa del Garrett. Generous and neighborly…at least to my face. But just because someone takes a somewhat liberal stance on a range of issues, does not mean they can see the people for the homosexuals. Take for example the president of our state senate, Mike Miller…
The Democratic President of the Senate in Maryland is urging “Evangelicals, Catholics, African Americans” to oppose an upcoming gay marriage bill, and to vote against one if it ever came to a public referendum. Senator Mike Miller on a radio program said that while he didn’t want to sound like Republican presidential hopefuls, “I’m a father married for 50 years, I got 5 children, I got 13 grandchildren, I’m a traditionalist.” Miller said he wouldn’t stand in the way of a vote, and if there is a vote, as expected, in the Senate, it would again pass. But Miller’s suggestion to minorities and the religious right to oppose an equal rights measure is patently offensive and divisive, and smacks of a Maggie Gallagher move.
Miller, in explaining his opposition, however, did sound like a Republican presidential candidate, saying, “I’m a historian and I look at civilizations, I study civilizations, I read history every night. And I see it’s an attack on the family, I think it’s an attack on traditional families. That’s the way I see it.”
Dig it. He doesn’t want to sound like a republican, but just so you know, homosexuals are a threat to families and to civilization. This is what we’re in for, for the next year or so if this bill becomes law and NOM fires up its mighty Wurlitzer to insure that Marylanders fear, loath and hate their gay and lesbian neighbors enough to deny them equal rights in marriage. But I have a question: has any nation or civilization ever collapsed because its people loved each other too much?
The so-called “license to bully” bill…would allow students to share any “religious, philosophical, or political views” that are “unpopular,” regardless of their consequences to the learning environment, and limits educators’ ability to curb such harassment.
Equality advocates lodged an email protest campaign against the measure, but were particularly surprised by the reaction of state Rep. John Ragan (R). In a long letter to one opponent of the bill, Ragan replied that gay “feelings” can be controlled by “mentally healthy adult human beings,” and concluded by stating, “Should society avoid disapproving of pedophilia, prostitution, murder, etc., because practitioners of those behaviors may commit suicide at higher rates?”
(Emphasis mine) What you have to understand about the human gutter is it has no bottom. Here is a man who wants to enable the very bullying that causes gay kids to kill themselves, saying the fact that gays are more likely to commit suicide is proof that there’s something wrong with them. Nice way to prove a point huh?
No bigot, there’s something wrong with you. Something profoundly, terribly wrong with you. Mentally healthy adult human beings? I’m laughing in your face. What do you call an adult who can abuse kids, can create a climate where kids can be easily abused, and does not see anything wrong with what they’re doing?
In Tennessee they’re now considering two bills that would do little more then put another knife into the hearts of gay kids in the Tennessee public school system. The Don’t Say Gay bill is back again, along with another, even more insidious if that’s possible, which would allow a religious exception to the current anti-bullying codes. A perfect excuse then, for kids to torment their gay peers to death under the guise of freedom of religion. If you can’t make gay kids hate themselves to death, then obviously your religion is being discriminated against…
In the current issue of the center-right policy journal, National Affairs, former Bush domestic policy adviser Tevi Troy worries about the decline of Washington think tanks into partisan messaging operations.
Stop…stop…you’re killing me. Seriously, on what planet were most beltway think tanks, and especially AEI and Heritage, ever not partisan messaging operations?
Yes, yes, liberal “think tanks” exist, but how many global corporations and multi-billionaires are going to fund a think tank that starts from an ideologically liberal economic position? Right wing and conservative “think tanks” basically rule the beltway discourse and you always know what their conclusions will be, and which party will happily benefit from them. Their non-partisanship is a farce. They are think tanks like Intelligent Design is science.
There’s a rule of thumb about think tanks: If you already know what the conclusion is before you pick up the paper and read it, it is not a think tank. Rand is a think tank. Let me explain by this example from Wiki:
In 1958, Democratic Senator Stuart Symington accused the RAND Corporation of defeatism for studying how the United States might strategically surrender to an enemy power. This led to the passage of a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the U.S. had demanded unconditional surrender of its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to U.S. interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender would have been.
See how that works. They asked a question they didn’t already know the answer to and set about to answer it. No ideology, just answers. AEI and Heritage, to name two, begin with the answer in the form of an ideological position (unconditional surrender is always the most favorable outcome) and try to figure out a way to message that for the benefits of republicans.
What these organizations do is tactical rhetoric, not thinking. Thinking is where you search for answers, not fashion attractive political battle flags. Thinking takes you into undiscovered places. That’s not allowed in organization like AEI, which Frum found out when he got the boot for not towing the line. These are party instruments, nothing more nothing less. They exist precisely to discourage thinking. You are told what to think. Or at any rate, what to say that you think.
Witness the decline in American governance. We can’t confront the real problems that exist because our institutions of government are mired in ideologies which demand fealty over everything else. Facts don’t matter, only the party matters, and free thinking is treason to the party. And so our ability as a nation to grow and prosper into the 21st century is limited to what the ideologies in power will allow, and that isn’t much. We were promised a shining city on a hill. What we got were factories closed, wages devastated, pensions lost, entire neighborhoods in foreclosure and state and local governments teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Yet the ideologies that promised us that shining city are never held to account. For all the think tanks in Washington, not a whole lot of thinking is actually going on.
As gay men and lesbians get closer and closer to the mainstream they’ve often traded in their image as the queer radicals who started the Stonewall Riots for the milquetoast assimilationists who want to get married and have kids and put HRC bumper stickers on their cars. That doesn’t mean we’re still not queer radicals. It just means we’re hiding it from you…
If this list amounts to what it means to be a queer radical then my gay friends would say I hide it very well too. Even from them. No, no…this is a lot of horseshit, and it’s been getting static from…well…gay folk all over the net already. But the writer could have expected that if he’d ever looked more closely at the lives of gay people then his regular night out with the boys at JR’s (or whatever his city’s equivalent is…). Here…let me have my swing at it…
Bottoming Is Fun
I suppose it is if you’re a bottom. Some of us are not that however, and what is more some of us are “Versatile” and some of us don’t like the anal thing At All.
This is a very superficial way to look at sex. Yes, yes…getting fucked is supposed to be some sort of dire insult to a guy’s manhood and we all need to push back on that. Especially since some straight guys enjoy being the bottom to their girlfriend’s Top (I’ll leave you to figure out the mechanics of that. Or just go ask Dan Savage). The point is what needs to be understood isn’t that some gay men like to be fucked and that’s okay, but that sex isn’t something one person does to another. It’s something both partners do Together. Active/Passive…Top/Bottom… Seriously, these are kinda useless terms if we’re supposed to take them literally. They don’t really mean anything.
Poppers Are Awesome
And maybe it’s the drugs telling you that.
Cocksucker Is Not an Insult
Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Neither is “Queer” I suppose. See above Re: Bottoming. Also George Carlin’s line about how “Fuck You” should really be “Not Fuck You” because fucking is a good thing.
We Have Our Own Celebrities
I have a question: would you still like your celebrities if I took your poppers away?
We Want to Fuck All the Hot Straight Boys
No. Just…no. Here…let me explain…
“It’s even better when you help…” Best movie line ever. See…straight boys don’t help. Yes, yes…they can be very easy on the eyes. Hot even. But…seriously. They’re straight. They’re not into guys. And I don’t particularly want to be fucked by someone who is weirded out by gay sex. I’d rather not end up after it feeling used and dirty. Perhaps you’re into that sort of thing. To each his own. I don’t want to fuck someone who isn’t as into it with me as I am into it with them. It’s even better when you help.
Not All Gay Couples Are Monogamous
You don’t say? Here…let me tell you a secret: not all heterosexual couples are either. Think about it. What would country music singers have to sing about if their girlfriends were faithful? Oh…right…their trucks…
We Can Have Sex Anywhere at Anytime
So can straight guys. It’s been called the world’s oldest profession. Nowadays its called Craig’s List.
We Don’t Love Drag Queens As Much As You Do
Speak for yourself. But I could have just said that at the beginning of this post and left it at that. Oh look…JR’s is half off on the house tequila. Hurry! I’ll be you can find some poppers there too. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life sober do you?
[Update…] Just so I’m not mistaken for a gay conservative crank because this guy’s list of radical queer baggage is full of crap, let me reiterate something I’ve droned on about over and over again here. You want to be a gay radical? A militant homosexual? Listen: A militant homosexual is a homosexual who doesn’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual. A militant homosexual activist is a homosexual acting like they don’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual.
That’s it. That’s all it takes. Really. When a gay person loves their other half with all their heart and soul and feels not the slightest shred of guilt or shame over that fact, when the fact of their love lifts them both to a higher place body and soul and makes them both feel that life is good and sweet and full of joy…they have become militant homosexuals in the eyes of the haters. When a gay individual reacts to an attack on their sexuality, on their capacity to feel love and desire the same way as any heterosexual would, they become militant homosexual activists.
Top or bottom doesn’t cut it. Poppers don’t make you anything but high. Oral sex, who you want to fuck, whether you are monogamous or not…it doesn’t matter. What makes you a radical queer is you are fine with yourself. Don’t believe me? Listen to how the haters talk about us a little more closely. They’re not pissed at the sex we have. They’re pissed because we don’t hate ourselves anymore.
And finally…something I used to put on my Sig line back in the Usenet days: I do not speak for the militant homosexual conspiracy. I only work here.
Episode 13 of A Coming Out Story deals with my discovery of photography as an art form…
What really got it going, and I have understood this for decades, was getting my first 35mm SLR camera. Ever since that moment, that What You See Is What You Get functionality of the 35mm SLR has completely entranced me. And they’re fast. Back in the early 1970s, open aperture through the lens metering had become common on all but the very least expensive (like my Petri) SLRs. And even the stop down metering of the Petri was fast, compared to holding the camera in one hand and a meter in the other. You could compose, focus and meter all at once and get the shot without ever having to take your eye out of the eyepiece. And what you saw in the viewfinder, was guaranteed to be what you got on the negative, since you were seeing exactly the same thing the film was going to see when the shutter opened.
I’ve tried to get into other kinds of cameras, because in one way or another they interest me too. My Mamiya C 330, a twin lens reflex, for its 120 roll film format and lens interchangeability, unique to TLRs. Various rangefinder cameras I’ve tried because rangefinders and small, lightweight, quiet and easier to focus in low light situations. But none of them have really worked as well for me as the 35mm SLR. Even my Hasselblad, a 120 roll film SLR, doesn’t really quite work for me. Having no through the lens metering makes it worlds slower, more deliberate in its use, then every 35mm SLR I have ever owned.
For me, the 35mm SLR is my instrument. Back in my teen years, after I had dived head first into full fledged shutterbug land, I worked one summer at a fast food joint flipping burgers to be able to buy what I thought at the time was the best 35mm SLR made: the Canon F1. In 1971 they had just come to the U.S. market, and I thought it just blew away the only real competition it had back then, the Nikon F.
I used that F1 all through my senior year, doing photos for the student newspaper and the yearbook. It was my constant companion in the halls and classrooms of my school. But there was another kid who was my rival back then. His name was Lindsey and he was always carrying his Nikon F. His professional black no less Nikon F.
I respected, and feared truth to tell, Lindsey’s abilities as a photographer. He was Good. He was also bold and brash in a way I could never be, and played the part of the glamorous photo pro with that damn Nikon as if he’d been born to it. I was envious. Eventually I decided to go with invisibility instead. Since I just didn’t have it in me to be out there and fabulous and make my subjects feel and respond to the glamor of my camera’s gaze I would become invisible instead, and observe. After a fashion that style worked for me. People became used to seeing the camera that was always with me and they came to forget its presence and I got tons of good candids. I became the detached observer. That has been my style ever since.
Though Lindsey’s skill as a photographer intimidated me, I had no such feelings about his damn Professional Black Nikon F. It was his tool, but also his status symbol, and he used it to get attention as much as he did to get his shot. But before I bought my F1, I had done my research (the geek was strong in me, even back then) and my logical analytical brain came to loath the Nikon F for what I regarded then as its inferior design, and when I was a teenager I made no bones about it to anyone who cared to listen. You are never so opinionated, as when you’re that age.
Time passes, the universe expands. On a trip out to Boulder Colorado for a JWST conference, I stopped in Topeka Kansas to visit a friend. He asked if I wanted to stop by the camera store they have there and I followed along, thinking to myself that here in the middle practically of Kansas it wouldn’t be much of one. I was wrong. That store, Wolf’s Camera, was amazing. Bigger and nicer even then Service Photo is here in Baltimore. And there, in the used camera display, was an almost mint condition Nikon F2.
I asked to look at it. And when my hands got around it, and I worked its mechanism a little, something awakened inside me. Something very much like the sensation I had when I bought my that Petri 35mm SLR back home and held it in my hands for the first time.
So I bought it.
And…the good 28mm lens they also had in that case to go with it, since I mostly shoot in wide-angle. Later, when I got back home, I scanned the used Nikon f-mount lens listings at B&H and bought a better 24mm f2.8 lens for it, and a 50mm f1.4.
A month later I am reading this on a photographer’s web site, while researching information on the old Nikons…
When doing photography for art’s sake, a camera can mean everything for putting you in the right frame of mind. Like that weird inter-being nerve fiber concept in “Avatar”, a photographer connects to a camera.
This is what I have come to realize (against the better judgment of my logical analytical side) You connect creatively with your tools at a very low level, intuitive, almost nerve-ending space and it might make no sense at all to that logical part of your brain (It’s Just A Tool!) but if it works for you then eventually you just go with it.
My Left Brain frowns at the Right Brain a lot, but I have always known at an intuitive level how connected I am to a camera while I am in the zone. Sometimes I hit the shutter release and I just know that was the one, and I feel an almost electrical pulse run from the camera through my hand and into me. Call me crazy, but that is how it feels. Finally, when I picked up that Nikon F2 in Topeka, I had to stop denying what my creative side has been telling me all these years: the Nikons can work with me…and maybe sometimes they work better.
This isn’t anything to do with their mechanical design. It’s this: tools have their personalities, especially complex mechanical ones, and some personalities work better with my creative moods then others. A mechanism can feel right, can seem beautiful to that creative part of me, even if the logical part finds tons of fault with it. Yes, it’s weird.
So it’s been with me and Nikon cameras. I could go on and on and on and on about what I don’t like about their design (ask some of my high school classmates). But the Canons have their personality and the Nikon a different one and I am a bit astonished now, after all these years, to hold one in my hands while I’m working and just admit that the Nikon =feels= more right.
Sigh. They say its a sign of maturity to be able to let go of old prejudices. These are not nearly the wonderful ground breaking cameras their ardent fans make them out to be. Yes, yes, they did break significant ground in some ways, most importantly in terms of bringing a true system approach to 35mm photography. The Nikon F was like the Kerby vacuum of cameras…there was an attachment for anything you wanted to do with one just about. But it was mostly a kludge. The one thing that made the kludgery worthwhile was the camera body: weirdly, clunky designed as it is, it really is that nearly bullet proof hockey puck they all said it was.
That’s part of their emotional appeal to me now. I like solid things in my life, but especially in my hands while I’m trying to be creative. But it’s more then that. The Canons feel brick solid in my hands too (even more so their lenses…the Nikon lenses just feel cheap and clunky to me), and yet they have a distinctly different sense to them mechanically from the Nikon. During the breaks while I was on jury duty I wandered downtown Baltimore with the F2 and it was a revelation. I was cursing and fumbling with its controls because every damn thing on a Nikon is backwards from the Canon…shutter speed setting, aperture setting…and yet I have never felt more at one with a camera when I was in that particular creative zone that I was in.
So…(here it comes…) I went ahead and found a good example of an F online…and bought it. Oh…AND an all black finish one at that. It arrived last week.
Dear Abby…What Do You Call A Friend Who Resents It When Life Sends Good Fortune Your Way?
To Whom It May Concern…
Okay…fine…whatever.
It’s always grade school all over again with us isn’t it, when one week we would be the best friends ever and the next you’re cutting me out. One week I’m one of the few people you know who can give you Intelligent Conversation. The week after that I’m not fabulous enough or I’m too nerdy or it’s why is Glenn hanging around with that queer and then I’m not someone you want to be seen with or even admit knowing.
I was the kid who wasn’t supposed to amount to anything. People in school thought so, people in my own goddamned family thought so. But I did amount to something after all. Somehow, I did. Maybe it’s because there always was more to me then everyone who kept putting me down told me there was. Maybe they didn’t want me to know I had some good stuff inside me. The scapegoat, the cheap punching bag is not allowed to think thoughts like that is he?
Some folks who used to know me back in the day are happy for me now. And some seem to just get all resentful. You for instance. Whatever. I wasn’t just handed the life I have now. Yes, I got lucky. So amazingly lucky. Yes, some people never get a break like the one I got. But when I got that break, I did something with it. So I guess I must have been able to so something with it. So I guess that Something was always inside of me after all. If I was the scrawny little looser some people kept telling me I was way back in the day, I’d have blown it. I didn’t. Maybe I should just stop letting people cut me up just for their own amusement.
I work at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We operate and administer the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. Lately I’ve been assigned to the team that is developing a test and integration laboratory for systems to be used on the James Webb Space Telescope. A couple months ago I was sent to Boulder Colorado for a JWST Partners Conference hosted by Ball. My security clearance got me into ITAR restricted seminars to learn what the other partners are doing to get this thing launched and sending back science data from L2. Oh…and I got a glowing performance review and a nice raise. But that’s less important to me, less thrilling by far, then the fact that every day I get to work in a place that harvests light from near the dawn of time and gives it to the world to study.
I am a part of that. Every fucking day at work I am told in word and in deed that I am not simply capable of intelligent, logical, and creative thinking, but that my talents and skills are Needed. Needed. Perhaps it’s time I started believing it deep down in my gut.
I’m too old for this. We’re done. I’m 58 years old now…why has believing in myself always been so goddamned hard. Well…one reason is the family I grew up in. They hated dad, and I got static from nearly everyone on mom’s side for having his face and his name. Then there was grade school. From the moment I entered grade school, being as I was the son of a single divorced working mother, I was immediately tossed into the problem child bin and never mind that I was actually a very well behaved kid. That single divorced working mother set a good example for her son. I’m 58 years old and my police record is cleaner then your kitchen floor. But in the stifling social prejudices of the late 1950s and early 60s, single divorced women were tainted, and that meant their children could be tossed into the gutter with a clear conscience. I know Exactly how it is that a teacher’s low expectations, placed upon a kid at that age, can work their way like rust into their heart.
But here’s another reason. Friends like you. A few beautiful popular kids who took me into their circle, I guess because they thought I’d make a good sidekick. A little raggedy puppy that would wag its tail at the slightest sign of approval. So I was allowed to tag along.
Some kids from those days who made friends with me really liked me. I guess they saw something inside of me even back then that I didn’t. I remember how Bob used to keep telling me I should go into computer work because I had a good head for it. I remember thinking how nice encouragement like that was, but I just couldn’t believe that someone like me could have that kind of a job. No, no…I was meant to be a stock boy or a burger flipper for the rest of my life. I know who those friends are. They’re the ones who are happy that I’ve made good at this late stage of my life, and occasionally give me an exasperated See…we told you so!
But not you. I remember how every time I tried to show you something good in me, capable in me, creative in me, you’d always smack it down. I was a little shutter bug long before I met you, but I never thought I could go the step further and set up my own darkroom until you showed me the simple one you’d set up in your basement. You showed me step by step how to develop film and make prints. So I thought, hey…I can do that… And I gathered the things together I needed and did my first roll of film and it was one of those moments in life that you look back on as a revelation, a turning point, where something deep inside of you awakens. I wanted to thank you for that. And for the next year or so I showed you the best of what I was doing. But it just made you resentful. So after a while I just stopped showing my photography to you.
After grade school you eventually dropped out of my life, and I was sorry to see you go. But it was like that. Especially after I started coming out of the closet. I never once heard a bigoted or even slightly prejudiced word from you about gays but there were times I wondered if that wasn’t part of it. You worked your way into the sound business and let me tag along for a while as a sometimes roadie. But we would cross paths less and less, especially after I started dinking around with the first micro computers that came to the market. Did you notice how adept I suddenly became with those things? Bob did. That’s probably why he kept nagging me to pursue it more seriously for its job potential. You started dinking around with them yourself but it was another photography thing where I shot ahead and you just lost interest and we saw each other even less after that. You moved west and got yourself a nice position at a big Vegas hotel. Then something happened…I don’t know what…and you vanished from sight for about a decade.
Then you popped back into my life, told me how fine it was to have me back again because I was such an intelligent conversationalist. You’d moved back to the east coast and invited me up to see you at the theater where you were working now. Somehow your situation had changed. You were living in a room over top of that theater. I guess you expected to see the same old Bruce who couldn’t afford much more then a room in someone’s basement himself. Then you learned I had a house of my own and you were fine with that. Then you learned I was a part of the Hubble Space Telescope team and you were fine with that. Your dad after all, had been part of the Apollo Moon program team. Then I drove up in a nice Honda Accord and you were fine with that. We had a good first meeting after so long apart. The next time I came to visit I drove up in a new Mercedes-Benz and it went downhill with us pretty rapidly after that.
What did you think? That this kid who was raised by a single working mother, who wore hand-me-down clothes she would get from the church for most of his childhood, would judge Anyone by their economic circumstances, let alone a friend? What the fuck? Don’t you think my entire life has taught me better then that? All through grade school, until I got diverted to Woodward ironically enough, I was judged by the low budget single parent household I was raised in. By teachers, by the other kids. And inside my own family I was constantly being judged by the fact that I was my father’s son. A stinking rotten good for nothing Garrett just like my pap.That’s what I was always supposed to be.
Now look at me. What the fuck? You think I didn’t learn something from that life?
No. Just…no. This isn’t about that. You know damn well I am not like that. This is you. This is you being as resentful as always, whenever the sidekick showed signs of being his own person.
There have been others like you in my life from my grade school years. Relationships I held onto for way too long, because deep down inside I thought I was lucky they even knew my name, because someone like me wasn’t really worthy of their company. So…Yes…I’m a moron. In some ways. I suppose we all in some ways. But we can learn from our mistakes too, and I’ve been making this one for far too long. I’m not the worthless good for nothing destined for abject failure all his life, if not a prison cell one day, that people kept telling me I was when I was a kid.
I’m 58 years old. I work for the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University, have had a successful career as an IT professional, and that has brought me some economic freedoms I never in my wildest dreams thought I would ever have one day. I have a nice little Baltimore rowhouse within walking distance of my place of work, and close to two nice grocery stores, drugstores, and lots of other good things. I drive a little Mercedes-Benz C class, and I have plans currently to trade it in for an E class diesel. I have a regular spot in Baltimore OUTLoud as a political cartoonist and sometimes photographer, my cartoons have also appeared in Family and Friends of Memphis, and Stonewall News Northwest. This has allowed me to get membership in the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists. Professionally, I am also a member of The Association for Computing Machinery, and the Project Management Institute. I have my own web site and a running cartoon series, A Coming Out Story, that gets hits from all over the world.
They say living well is the best revenge. Sort of. It’s not about having things, it’s about doing things. It’s about letting the spirit that was always within you shine. As bright as it can. As bright as it must. That is living well. Then you don’t need revenge. Revenge is for chickenshits.
So is hanging onto toxic relationships. Never love yourself less then you love someone else.
Goodbye, good luck…have a great life of your own. I really mean that. Whatever horrible thing it was that happened to you back in Las Vegas I hope you have found your path to rise above it and have a good life. Now go away.
A few years ago, I decided that it would be interesting to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Not just regular “from scratch,” but really from scratch. Like, I’d make the buns, I’d make the mustard, I’d grow the tomatoes, I’d grow the lettuce, I’d grow the onion, I’d grind the beef, make the cheese, etc…
Therein follows many months of building a house, raising livestock, planting gardens, realizing he needs to mine his own salt, needs not one but three cows (one for milk for butter, one for the beef, one for rennet for the cheese)…and so on…
Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.
A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society…
Some would say that’s a good reason not to have a post-agrarian society. I strongly disagree. Never mind steel and integrated circuits. The Industrial Revolution gave us Cheeseburgers.
Ayn Rand placed the dollar sign as the iconic symbol of capitalism and the Industrial age…proof I submit, that the lady had no art in her soul. She should have made it the cheeseburger. Seriously. When her and Owen Kellogg left the abandoned train at the end of part two, instead of revealing himself as an agent of the strike by pulling out a cigarette with a dollar sign on it, he should have started snarfing down a cheeseburger from Hugh Akston’s diner. That newstand at the end of chapter three should have been a burger joint and the old man reminiscing about when they made burgers out of real meat and cheese, not collectivist tofu and soy. He should have said to Dagny Taggart, “I like to think of burgers held in a man’s hand. Big fat juicy ones dripping with cheddar cheese and mustard. Food, a dangerous force, served with a side of fries and maybe also a dollip of coleslaw…” At the end of the book John Galt could trace the outline of a cheeseburger in the sky.
Behold Atlas, holding the world upon his shoulders…beset upon by socialist moochers, second-handers and looters…
…not. Let’s be real here…no welfare queen ever had a larger sense of entitlement then the tea partiers.
Its easy to point and laugh at signs like the one above…and this one…
But it isn’t just the crazies who’ve been taken in and lit up by the right wing noise machine. To one degree or another, the nation as a whole has accepted a disastrously false economic construct: that the economy is driven by businesses, banks and wealthy investors. Producers produce wealth, consumers consume it. Producers build factories, establish businesses, engage in commerce and thereby create jobs…almost as a side effect of their economic vitality. It’s their world, they built it, these Atlases of commerce. The rest of us just live in it. Without the Atlases the rest of us would have nothing.
Hence the bellyaching about going Galt. It’s like the constantly nagging and entitled parent or grandparent who keeps warning You’ll be sorry when I’m gone and after so many years of it you’ve begun planning a party to celebrate the event. There’s a scene in Atlas Shrugged where the worthless playboy Francisco d’Anconia (secretly an agent of the Galt’s Gulch strikers) talks with industrialist Hank Rearden, owner of Rearden Steel and inventor of Rearden Metal. They are at a party at Readen’s magnificent mansion. They stand at a window as a storm rages in the night outside…
“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco d’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.”
Rearden did not answer for a moment; then he said, as if in answer to himself, a tone of wonder in his voice, “Funny…”
“What?”
“You told me what I was thinking just a while ago…”
“You were?”
“…only I didn’t have the words for it.”
“Shall I tell you the rest of the words?”
“Go ahead.”
“You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel – because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren’t for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.”
…and just never you mind the people who designed and engineered that house, who mined its marble floors and brass and gold for its fixtures, who felled and milled the trees and laid the bricks and stones. See…they don’t even exist in the right winger frame of mind, let alone the world of Ayn Rand, except as looters, moochers and second-handers, leaching off the vitality of the world’s Atlases like vampires. But without all those looters, those second-handers, those moochers paying rents for their own modest apartments, or buying their own modest homes, purchasing their own little economy cars and appliances, patronizing various merchants, making the building of all those things economically viable, Hank Rearden’s foundries would have nothing to do and his magnificent mansion would have never been built and he’d be shit out of luck on that open plain too.
Whose, really, is the motor of the world? Nick Hanauer, himself a venture capitalist, sees where it really is:
It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. But it’s equally true that without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do.
That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.
And that’s what has been happening in the U.S. for the last 30 years.
Since 1980, the share of the nation’s income for fat cats like me in the top 0.1 percent has increased a shocking 400 percent, while the share for the bottom 50 percent of Americans has declined 33 percent. At the same time, effective tax rates on the superwealthy fell to 16.6 percent in 2007, from 42 percent at the peak of U.S. productivity in the early 1960s, and about 30 percent during the expansion of the 1990s. In my case, that means that this year, I paid an 11 percent rate on an eight-figure income.
One reason this policy is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff…
I can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the tens of millions of middle-class families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages…
We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Middle-class consumers do, and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit…
So let’s give a break to the true job creators. Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth by putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle class. And let’s remember that capitalists without customers are out of business…
The meme, the Randian dogma, the right wing spin the nation has bought into since Reagan sold us on it, that it is the rich industrialists who create jobs. No. Customers create jobs. The flow of money from employer to employee to employer again creates jobs. Building factories and office space where there is no demand for goods, simply because you suddenly have tons of money to do something with, is what happens in this thing they call a Bubble. Hey…let’s build a factory because we can! No demand, no sales. No sales: bankruptcy. The factory closes, the employees loose their paychecks, the money stops flowing, the motors…were…stopping…
We’ve seen how that works, time and time again in the past thirty years, yet the right wingers keep insisting if we just give more free money to the rich they’ll build factories, or offices space or something and then the rest of us will have jobs. But nobody sane builds a factory if it isn’t bloody likely to sell anything that it makes.
No. The super rich won’t build factories. Not if there is no money to be made doing that. And if they can plainly see there is an easier way to make money, they’ll do that instead. And for them these days, there is. It’s called Wall Street. So if the middle class is dying, how are the rich making money these days…?
A newly-released study from the Congressional Research Service bolsters claims that the nation’s largest banks profited off the Federal Reserve’s financial crisis-era programs by borrowing cash for next to nothing, then lending it back to the federal government at substantially higher rates.
The report reinforces long-held beliefs that the banking system in essence engaged in taxpayer-financed arbitrage: They got money for free, then lent it back to Uncle Sam while collecting juicy returns.
They make paper profits by moving money back and forth among each other, and then when that blows up in their faces, they take it from the taxpayers…the middle class and the poor. Obviously they’re fine with that system and don’t want it touched. But it is not sustainable and they are not just putting the economy at risk, but our very democracy.
You see, trickle down economics really does work…but only from the middle down. I grew up in the world Hanauer speaks of. I remember it well. I was raised by a single working mother back in a day when women made maybe 60 cents on the dollar a man made for doing the same work. I wore a lot of hand-me-down clothes mom got from the church, but I never went out the door in dirty clothes. We ate a simple, very bland English diet, but I never went to bed hungry. I got a decent education because back in the late 50s and early 60s we were in a cold war with the Soviet Union and public education was something the nation was keen to spend money on so we didn’t loose the technological race. There were good jobs (at least if you were white). And all those high paying union jobs went to families who spent that money on goods and services, not at the Wall Street casino. And that made it possible for poorer, service sector workers, even single mothers, to still earn a living wage and raise kids. I know this. I am one of those kids.
Yes, when government sucks money out of the economy in the form of oppressive taxes, that will stifle economic growth and kill the middle class too. But taxation isn’t the only worry and big government isn’t the only threat to the economy. You can kill the middle class by sucking their wages out in the form of taxes, but you can also kill it, as we are clearly seeing now, by slashing wages in order to maintain astronomical profits that do nothing more then grease the roulette wheels of Wall Street. Big business can be every bit the threat to the economy and to democracy that big government can be.
There need to be brakes put on both. For the sake of our cherished freedoms, and our children’s and their children’s. Libertarianism, with its dogma of unregulated unfettered capitalism utterly removes the brakes on big business. Anyone with eyes to see and a mind not completely corrupted by ideology can see in the decades after Reagan sold us that shining city on a hill what comes of that. If the totalitarian police state is one side of a coin, Libertarianism is the other. Heads, power collects in the hands of the few, the people become their slaves, the economy grinds to a halt and the country tailspins into economic collapse. Tails: see heads.
Democracy gave the common man and woman, gave humanity as a whole, a level of prosperity that would have astonished the peasants who labored under the kings of old. To live, it needs a robust and energetic economy. And to have that, you need a stable and prosperous middle class. Because those people take their money and they spend it on Things…on goods and services that other people earn money making…and that keeps the money circulating and the economy humming along.
John Galt isn’t the motor of the world. John and Jane Doe are.
1943, Female Welder at Work in a Steel Mill by Margaret Bourke-White
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
