Rand Paul, white heterosexual tea party candidate won his contest last night, and among cheering white heterosexual supporters announced to the world…
I have a message – a message from the people of Kentucky, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We’ve come to take our government back!
Our government. Our government. Our government. This from the man who said it was wrong for government to force businesses to obey civil rights laws because it was a violation of individual liberty, but who also thinks government should be in the business of controlling women’s bodies, dictating what is and what is not marriage and what is and what is not a family. So when speaks of “the people” and utters the phrase “our government” it’s pretty easy to tell that “the people” are not necessarily his neighbors in this life but merely his own kind. White. Heterosexual. Oh…and rich. Very very rich.
Thus, the Louisiana Courier Press reported during the campaign…
Along with college and university students, Paul is courting the libertarian-leaning Republicans who got excited about his father. But to win a Kentucky primary, he’ll need social conservatives, and University of Kentucky political scientist Stephen Voss said he must be careful as he tries to appeal to both.
“This is a difficult tightrope to walk,” said Voss, who nonetheless believes Paul may be the front-runner right now. “When he’s talking economics and money, he is philosophically a libertarian. When he talks about social issues, he’s sending guarantees to the right wing that he’s not libertarian.”
Paul says he opposes abortion without exception, not even in cases of rape, incest or the health of the expectant mother. He also opposes marriages between gay and lesbian couples. At the same time, he voices staunch opposition to government intruding in the private lives of citizens.
A Difficult Tightrope To Walk… No, not a tightrope, a deception. There are two kinds of “libertarian”. There’s the useful tools who really believe that crap. I was one of those back in the late 70s and moved around in Libertarian circles, working on campaigns, getting bored shoppers to sign our petitions, and that was where I saw that I was basically just a useful tool for the other sort of Libertarian. The faux ones. The rich right wingers and hard core John Birchers who saw libertarian rhetoric as a good way to bamboozle voters, especially young voters. I first saw it when a vigorous argument broke out in the ranks after the U.S. supreme court decision in Hardwick v. Bowers upheld the state’s sodomy laws. I was aghast and fully expected my comrades in the movement to be also. But…no. It was all about “state’s rights” many of them said. But, but…says I…surely the states don’t have the right to toss grown adults in jail for simply for having sex either, no matter how strongly others may disapprove. Individual liberty and all that. No, no, I was told over and over. “State’s rights”. “State’s rights”. “State’s rights”.
It was a slogan I had come to know well from the fight over race segregation in America, and I knew perfectly well even at a young age just what it was code for, along with that other famous code phrase of the time. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.
The free association in dreams can be a really fascinating thing to examine when you get a hook on it. This morning I woke up from a dream where I was trying with no success to photograph a gay pride parade. In the typical way of dreams that want to frustrate you, the digital SLR I was carrying absolutely refused to take the shots I was trying to take. But what stuck in my mind after I woke up, was the enchanting use of two commonplace words.
I was standing at one end of the main street of some small city: a mashup as these dream locals usually are of several city neighborhoods I’ve lived in over the course of my life. The parade was coming toward me in the distance and I was facing down a street with a grade that casually dipped down and then rose back up again in the distance to a point slightly higher then where I was standing. Both sides of the street were packed with old brick buildings, like oversized row houses. Most were shops with large glass display windows. Narrow sidewalks lined both sides of the street, which was empty of cars for the parade. People lined the street, watching the parade in the distance as it came toward us.
I had a good digital SLR around my neck and a camera bag with various items hanging from one shoulder. As I tried to snap off a few shots of the people watching, and also of the parade in the distance, the camera kept failing to take the shot. Interestingly, the camera gave me tactile feedback that the shot had failed, by way of the shutter release. Instead of a short sharp throw and clean release, the button became heavy and mushy and then would not move. As soon as I felt it I knew something had gone wrong. I glanced at the digital display on the back of the camera, only to see a shot I’d taken some weeks before, still on the memory card.
Ah…thinks I…the memory card is full. I tried erasing what was on it, not caring at that point if I’d saved the images off somewhere because I had a job to do, which was cover the pride parade. But the card would not erase. It was that kind of dream. I tried reformatting it and that didn’t work. So I ejected that one and rummaged around in my camera bag for another. But all I could find were old, low capacity cards. I knew I couldn’t get many shots on those, but now I was getting desperate, the parade was coming closer, so I popped one in. When I tried to take a shot with it, the camera ejected it.
I was on a main street, full of little shops. I wondered if one of those sold memory cards. Here’s where it got interesting. I walked over to one of the bystanders and asked them if there was a place nearby that sold glass. “Glass” in this dream world, apparently being the word people used for memory cards. The guy I asked knew right away what I meant, and pointed me to a shop just a couple doors down. I thanked my good fortune and ran over to it and ducked inside.
Inside was like an old candy store, except instead of chocolate bars there were dozens and dozens of different kinds of memory cards, all laid out in rows of trays. There was no packaging, just the cards, by type and brand. Most were of types I’d never seen before. It was almost like looking a trays of loose nuts and bolts except the cards were all laid out neatly in rows. As I looked over a particular row of cards, the proprietor of the shop, a friendly looking older guy who was standing behind the counter, told me that the glass in that particular section were all product fancy. It was a term I immediately understood to mean second hand.
It’s interesting how the mind works. “Product fancy” in that dream world, was when someone buys something and they take it home and it turns out it wasn’t the right size or something after all, so they bring it back and exchange it for something else that is right. So it was merchandise returned almost immediately either without having been used or only used once. A higher grade of second hand merchandise in other words. “Like new”. The term “product fancy” probably came from some dream state free conflation in my mind of two senses of the word “fancy”: something you desire, and something illusory. I thought that was the right size but it wasn’t…
The use of “glass” for “memory card” probably came from that dream state free association of memory chips and silicon, which is what chips are made from, and silica which is the oxide of silicon glass is made from.
The dream ended as I was looking through the trays for a memory card so I don’t know if I ever found one and got the parade shots I wanted, but when it ended I was confidant they were there, that shop seemed to sell nothing but memory cards and they had hundreds of different types all laid out like candy bars in a candy store, so I probably did eventually get my shots. That was a kinda neat world though. Some mornings I wake up wishing I lived in the world I was just dreaming about.
But We Must Consider The Feelings Of The Bullies Too…
The problem with directly confronting and dealing with anti-gay bullying is apparently we have to do it in a way that doesn’t make the bullies feel like they’re doing anything wrong…
A spate of teen suicides linked to anti-gay harassment is prompting school officials nationwide to rethink their efforts against bullying – and in the process, risk entanglement in a bitter ideological debate.The conflict: Gay-rights supporters insist that any effective anti-bullying program must include specific components addressing harassment of gay youth. But religious conservatives condemn that approach as an unnecessary and manipulative tactic to sway young people’s views of homosexuality.
It’s a highly emotional topic. Witness the hate mail – from the left and right – directed at Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District while it reviews its anti-bullying strategies in the aftermath of a gay student’s suicide…
What leaps out at you first here is the rote equivocation on the part of this mainstream reporter. Instead of stating what is simply a fact here that religious conservatives insist young people’s views of homosexuals must remain negative, its religious conservatives condemn that approach as an unnecessary and manipulative tactic to sway young people’s views of homosexuality. Never mind that. Note that its hate mail when it comes both from the homophobes and people outraged at what homophobes are doing to helpless children.
Reporters can’t be taking sides after all. Just imagine the national outrage and loathing if the news media was as carefully neutral toward Al Qaeda. We can’t call them terrorists after all, that would be taking sides…
This in a nutshell, is why gay kids are dying. The religious right has successfully convinced everyone that brutalizing gays is an essential part of their religious freedom. Hating Jews might raise a few eyebrows. Hating people of color might get them some frowns of disapproval. But to even question that they are and have been for decades now engaged in a systematic campaign of hate mongering, let alone question their need to hate their gay neighbor is apparently a step too far. And the consequence is that gay kids feel as though they have no friends in the adult world. Their need for love and acceptance in this world is of no more importance then the need of bigots to spit in their faces and look the other way while their kids kick them in the stomach. They are alone.
But if we act aggressively to protect gay kids from bullying we’re taking sides and that just wouldn’t be fair…
But at least four younger teens have killed themselves since July after being targeted by anti-gay bullying, including Justin Aaberg, 15, of Andover, Minn., who hanged himself in his room in July. His friends told his mother he’d been a frequent target of bullies mocking his sexual orientation.Five other students in his Anoka-Hennepin school district have killed themselves in the past year, and gay-rights advocates say bullying may have played a role in two of these cases as well.
Carlson, the district superintendent, lost a teenage daughter of his own in a car crash, and says he shares the anguish of the parents bereaved by suicide. He acknowledges that a controversial district policy calling for “neutrality” in classroom discussions of sexual orientation may have created an impression among some teachers, students and outsiders that school staff wouldn’t intervene aggressively to combat anti-gay bullying.
As we software engineers say, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature…
Evan Hurst says he’s listening to Queensrÿche tonight because he’s a category-defiant gay. When my first grade teacher called me defiant I should have insisted she prepend that term with “Category”… Oh no Miss Kiefer…I am Category Defiant… A good way to make her hate me even more was to let her know I knew more words then the other kids…
A Random 10
(Open iTunes or your iPod app, go to your songs list, select Shuffle and list the first ten songs that pop up…)
“Career March” – The Apartment, Adolph Deutsch
“Sound of Thunder” – Duran Duran
“Reflections of Earth – Epcot: Tapestry of Dreams, Gavin Greenaway
“Hit The Ground Runnin'” – Lie To Me, Jonny Lang
“Goliath” – David and Bathsheba, Alfred Newman
“$100 Understanding” – Happy Ending, Michel Legrand
“Jeux d’ enfants” – Bizet
The Rite of Spring, Part II, The Exalted Sacrifice – Igor Stravinsky
“Freedom” – The Best of Jimi Hendrix
“Cutting Edge” – The Brave Little Toaster, David Newman
No kidding…one minute its Enter Sandman and the next its Wichita Lineman…
This month’s column is a tale of two rats. One rat got lots of attention from its mother when it was young; she licked its fur many times a day. The other rat had a different experience. Its mother hardly licked its fur at all. The two rats grew up and turned out to be very different. The neglected rat was easily startled by noises. It was reluctant to explore new places. When it experienced stress, it churned out lots of hormones. Meanwhile, the rat that had gotten more attention from its mother was not so easily startled, was more curious, and did not suffer surges of stress hormones.
The same basic tale has repeated itself hundreds of times in a number of labs. The experiences rats had when they were young altered their behavior as adults. We all intuit that this holds true for people, too, if you replace fur-licking with school, television, family troubles, and all the other experiences that children have. But there’s a major puzzle lurking underneath this seemingly obvious fact of life. Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes. Each of our brain cells contains the same set of genes we were born with and uses those genes to build proteins and other molecules throughout its life. The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work.
Neuroscientists are now mapping that mechanism…
This is interesting on a number of accounts. Firstly, as a gay man, it concerns me how the question of nature verses nurture is dealt with, as it has been a trip point in the culture war for decades now. And as it seems to be turning out more and more, it’s a combination of both. The story here is that genes may say one thing, but the effects of the environment, the physical environment, you grow up in, can overrule them all the same…
Two families of molecules perform that kind of genetic regulation. One family consists of methyl groups, molecular caps made of carbon and hydrogen. A string of methyl groups attached to a gene can prevent a cell from reading its DNA sequence. As a result, the cell can’t produce proteins or other molecules from that particular gene. The other family is made up of coiling proteins, molecules that wrap DNA into spools. By tightening the spools, these proteins can hide certain genes; by relaxing the spools, they can allow genes to become active.
How this plays out in terms of one’s sexual orientation fascinated me less then this…
…the influence of environment doesn’t end with childhood. Recent work indicates that adult experiences can also rearrange epigenetic marks in the brain and thereby change our behavior. Depression, for example, may be in many ways an epigenetic disease. Several groups of scientists have mimicked human depression in mice by pitting the animals against each other. If a mouse loses a series of fights against dominant rivals, its personality shifts. It shies away from contact with other mice and moves around less. When the mice are given access to a machine that lets them administer cocaine to themselves, the defeated mice take more of it.
Something, probably my body’s low tolerance to intoxicants, has kept me thankfully clear of addiction. But I know its temptations. There are days when I think if I could only drug myself out my my misery, life would be so much better. But my body simply won’t let me do that. I have no escape. Well…I have one. But it’s one I’ve not reached for. So far.
I have the job of my dreams. A house of my own I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I’d have. My dream come true car. And I am miserable. Single, lonely and miserable. If you don’t have love, nothing else matters. You can be rich. You can be living in the lap of luxury, and if you have no one, you have nothing and you know it. You will always know it. And at some level I have always known my brain was stacked against me in that struggle.
I was brutalized in grade school. It was only by shear luck that I lived in a tiny neighborhood that was diverted to this little expansion high school in a well to do neighborhood and away from my tormentors that allowed me to have at least a good final three years of grade school. Woodward was paradise compared to my Jr. High School years and my elementary school years were only slightly less brutal. When I wasn’t getting beaten up by the other kids, I was getting emotionally battered by the teachers, nearly all of whom dumped me in the problem child category, simply because mom was a single divorced mother. The few in those days who actually took an interest in me and gave me a chance to learn have always had my eternal gratitude.
Woodward, I have said time and again, was paradise…absolutely the best years of my school life. But even paradise could not undo the damage. It wasn’t until my senior year that I finally started peeking out of the shell my tormentors had locked me into. And by then it was, really, too late to start figuring out that dating and mating thing. And besides, I was a gay kid, and it was 1971.
And I’m 57 now, and still single, and if anything surprises me it’s that I’m still alive. I really shouldn’t be. I honestly don’t know why I am still alive. It’s your own fault Bruce. We had to do it to you. You were so weird we had to. It’s your own fault Bruce. You need to get out more. Friends don’t help friends find a lover, they rub it in that it’s their own fault. People who look like that, want people who look like that. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Why am I still here?
It was posted at Suicide.org, and it’s from a gay teen, aged 16, named Steven, who attempted suicide. He survived.
It’s brutal, and I would rather no gay kid reads it. Seriously, if you’re a gay teen go look at some of the videos over at Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project. Because it Does get better. You don’t need to be dealing with what I’m about to post here. You have resources. The Trevor Hotline is a 24-hour toll-free suicide prevention line for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning youth. Call them at 1-866-4-U-Trevor (866-488-7386). But seriously…go see It Gets Better. And…I love you. Hang in there. There are adventures waiting for you live them. There are people waiting in your future for you to come into their lives and make them smile and feel like they will always be loved and never be lonely again. Your dreams are waiting for you. Walk proudly into them.
After decades of demonizing gay people and blasting devotion of same-sex couples as fraudulent, Maggie Gallagher suddenly surprises everyone by announcing she thinks she has a heart…
“The suicide of that teen was not only a tragedy it was a crime. The young people who violated laws out of mindless desire to bully or embarrass or whatever the heck kids do this stuff will be prosecuted and probably jailed, I hope. Nothing in the press accounts suggest the kids who did this were motivated by homophobia, and the cruelty of cyberbullying is causing teen suicides among those who are not gay, as well. I do not think the absence of gay marriage is the cause of these tragedies or its presence will resolve them. We can make this a symbol of all our other fights, or we can try to save all our kids, gay and straight, from this kind of ugly and mindless cruelty. My heart goes out to the family of the young man. God bless him and them.” – Maggie Gallagher, commenting on NOM’s blog.
“A group of San Francisco first-graders took an unusual field trip to City Hall on Friday to toss rose petals on their just-married lesbian teacher – putting the public school children at the center of a fierce election battle over the fate of same-sex marriage,” the front page story by Jill Tucker begins.
In fact, the parents who decided to surprise the beloved schoolteacher didn’t put the children “at the center of a fierce election battle” – the Chronicle did for sensationalism.
According to blogger Paul Hogarth in his Oct. 24 dissection of the piece for Beyond Chron and Daily Kos (“SF Chronicle Jeopardizes Marriage Equality”), Tucker said that “the parents who organized the trip actively sought media coverage—and the paper decided on its own that it was ‘news’ enough to deserve front-page treatment.”
Since lesbian weddings were legal then, one can image that the parents might have expected any coverage to go in the back with the other wedding announcements. On Oct. 26 two aggrieved parents sent a letter to the Yes on 8 campaign and the Chronicle complaining about their children “being exploited and used as pawns” by the Yes campaign which downloaded the front page picture from the Chronicle’s website to use in their ads.
Sapphocrat, who blogs at LavenderLiberal, complained vociferously about the Chronicle’s failure to put the field trip into the larger context of the Creative Arts Charter School’s philosophy.
But the damage was done. In an in-depth interview with me after Prop 8 passed, campaign consultant Steve Smith said they were winning back the critical undecided women’s vote until the Yes ad featuring the Chronicle story on the lesbian teacher.
That post by Karen Ocamb centers on the roll of the San Francisco Chronicle in instigating the successful Yes On 8 attack ads which used that teacher’s wedding as a hook for their The Homos Are Invading Your Schools To Turn Your Kids Gay message. But lurking in the background of her story is this simple, brutal fact: Maggie Gallagher and her fellow travelers in the Proposition 8 battle used the love those kids had for their teacher as a knife to cut their teacher’s ring finger off.
But she wants to save kids from mindless cruelty. Right. And Osama Bin Laden wants to save them from terrorist attacks.
More cartoons on The Cartoon Page…and many more in the archives I’ve been neglecting to update for so long…
The English Had London, The French Had Paris, And The Germans Had…Er…Lots of Castles…
Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of Germans and their History
by Simon Winder
I have this in my iPad book library and the biggest thing it’s taught me so far is how absolutely pathetic my grade school history lessons were. The history of Europe in the middle ages I was taught, was exclusively that of England, and not really very much of that. We didn’t get to the rest of Europe until the Renaissance and even that didn’t cover much of Europe. I knew nothing of this thing called The Holy Roman Empire (which actually bore very little relationship to the Roman Empire of the Cesars) until I started reading this book.
I’m finding that individuals engaged in a personal exploration of their world tell a Much more satisfying tale of history then academics, although their accounts need to be paid attention to as well. That “street level view” of history often provides you with so many little telling details the high level view does not. Case in point being Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler, which just completely floored me as to how little I really knew about that period of time, despite having World War II history drummed into me throughout my childhood in school and on TV, in comic books and the movies.
In this case, Winder, an Englishman who became fascinated by Germany for somewhat different reasons then I did (I, after I reconnected with my first high school crush who is German, Winder after his father took his family to the Continent one vacation and he had his eyes opened to a whole ‘nother world), tells us about the history he meticulously, even obsessively uncovered for himself. And we sense that history in his retelling of it as one interesting or puzzling or amazing discovery after another after another after another. Text books so often, and tragically, kill that sense of learning something new as an adventure.
His book engages you. But also, and this is what makes a personal reading of history so worthwhile, you see how digging up the history of another land and its people brings him some insights on the history of his own native land for him. So here in this book I am getting insights into both German and British people and their histories and their relationship past and present to each other. A different teller would tell it a tad differently, but still authentically, and that would give you, the reader, a few more telling details that the high level histories would have overlooked, because that is not where they go.
I’m glad I stumbled on this book. Yes, sometimes Winder tries a little too hard to be humorous and it comes off just flippant. But better that then dry and boring. And he’s completely wrong about German food. At least what makes it across the ocean here is just wonderful. But I suppose that’s true of all local eats. The lousy stuff tends to get left back home.
And…gosh…I can’t believe I went through a pretty decent U.S. public school education and walked out still being so ignorant of so much history.
NASA is looking hard at a way to blast spacecraft horizontally down an electrified track or gas-powered sled and into space hitting speeds of about Mach 10. The craft would then return and land on a runway by the launch site.
The rail launcher, known Advanced Space Launch System is one of a few new launch systems a team of engineers from Kennedy Space Center and several other NASA centers are looking at that would use existing cutting-edge technologies to offer the space agency a next generation launcher to the stars, NASA stated.
Ah… Just like us space cadet kids always knew it would be…
Atrios wonders about something I’ve been shaking my head at since chain store and restaurant shopping took over America…
I certainly don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the American consumer, but recession issues aside I’m puzzled by the apparent belief by developers and retail experts that when people travel to tourist locations what they really want to do, most of all, is visit the same shops that they can visit in any high end mall all over the country. Maybe they’re right. What do I know?
They’re right, but here’s what you know: if all you want from travel is what you already have at home, then all you’re doing is spending money, running out the clock on your life, and getting nothing at all out of it.
Back in 2002 in a post of travel notes I wrote, “You didn’t come all this way for another Big Mac.” Apparently a lot of people do however. They’re not just wasting their vacations, they’re wasting their lives. Several years ago some friends of mine took me on my first ever trip outside the country, to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and I will be forever grateful that they decided on staying in the old part of town and not the newer touristy one. Swear to god on the way into town from the airport I saw a Chili’s and my jaw dropped a little. What the hell does Mexico want with one of those??? But of course, it was the Yankee tourists who wanted it there. We ate at the Chili’s in Puerto Vallarta…it felt So Authentic!
Whatever…
Puerto Vallarta was Beautiful…
Just Beautiful…
Very Beautiful…
Er…yes…
Just imagine all the fun I could have had, shopping at all the same stores I can shop in at home, and eating out in all the same restaurants I can eat at in the Towson Town Mall.
There should be an international convention that bars chain restaurants and stores from crossing boarders. I would be in favor of a constitutional amendment banning them from crossing state lines too.
At The Daily Dish, Conor Friedersdorf links to an Atlantic article about World War II…The Real War…
WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THE SECOND WORLD War that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt? What was it that made the Americans, especially, so fertile with insult and cynicism, calling women Marines BAMS (broad-assed Marines) and devising SNAFU, with its offspring TARFU (“Things are really fucked up”), FUBAR (“Fucked up beyond all recognition”), and the perhaps less satisfying FUBB (“Fucked up beyond belief”)? It was not just the danger and fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and deprivation. It was the conviction that optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable. They knew that in its representation to the laity, what was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied.
Neither man, Disney or Rockwell, was, of course, a journalist. Nor did either one make any such claim to be one. They were artists. I tire Very easily now, of the use of Rockwell and Disney’s names as synonymous with Phony. These men were many things but phony was not one of them. Neither one ever put anything before the public, I am absolutely certain, that they themselves did not believe. Art, said Picasso, is a lie that makes us see the truth. All artists are liars in one sense, but in that other sense, that soul speaking to soul sense, relentlessly truthful. Both men spoke to us from their hearts, honestly and sincerely, and you can argue that life isn’t like that if you wish, but my reply to that is Yes, you’re right, it isn’t, but it ought to be.
It’s a different matter though with journalism. Journalists need to tell the public the facts, or else we simply cannot function as a democracy. And that is especially true in times of war.
That war, morally justified as it was, was also very heavily sanitized on the home front. With the last of its soldiers passing away now, we are only beginning to see how nightmarishly savage it was. The bloody slaughter of the American Civil War it seems, was merely prelude to the 20th century…
You would expect frontline soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends’ bodies violently detached. If you asked a wounded soldier or Marine what hit him, you’d hardly be ready for the answer “My buddy’s head,” or his sergeant’s heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain’s severed hand. What drove the troops to fury was the complacent, unimaginative innocence of their home fronts and rear echelons about such an experience…
After one artillery exchange, two soldiers, Neil McCallum and his friend “S.” came upon the body of a man after a shell had landed at his feet…
“Good God,” said S., shocked, “here’s one of his fingers.” S. stubbed with his toe at the ground some feet from the corpse. There is more horror in a severed digit than in a man dying: it savors of mutilation. “Christ,” went on S. in a very low voice, “look, it’s not his finger.”
I got part way though the Atlantic article, when this passage struck me…
In the great war Wilfred Owen was driven very near to madness by having to remain for some time next to the scattered body pieces of one of his friends. He had numerous counterparts in the Second World War. At the botched assault on Tarawa Atoll, one coxswain at the helm of a landing vessel went quite mad, perhaps at the shock of steering through all the severed heads and limbs near the shore. One Marine battalion commander, badly wounded, climbed above the rising tide onto a pile of American bodies. Next afternoon he was found there, mad.
There’s a reason my generation are called the baby boomers. We are the generation born to the ones who fought that war, came home, and all at once returned to what would have been normal lives were it not for the war…which for heterosexuals (and homosexuals, because the closet was not an option but a necessary means of survival in those days…) meant getting married and having kids. All at once. It was literally a baby boom. Housing was scarce for the new families for years. Suburban Levittowns sprang up all over America. Schools had to be built, many schools, many, Many schools, to handle the load…only to later be decommissioned as my old high school eventually was, after the last of the boom had graduated. We are a massive bulge in the population, and that is because there was a war. A very big, catastrophic, savage and bloody war…that changed so much…so very very much…
Mom told me often about the sailor she dated during WWII. When she got started, I could see that look of remembrance of first love in her eyes, hear it in her voice, still, so many years later. So many little things about him she remembered vividly. So many stories about the times they had together…about waiting patiently for his letters from overseas during the war…about how her father disliked Jews, but came to see them as fellow neighbors in life by coming to know the Jewish man she loved. She loved him, probably to her dying day.
When I asked her once why she married Dad instead, she said her sailor was on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended, and that his ship became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it. She said the sight of it had driven him mad.
…and all these years I wondered, never doubting that he’d gone mad as mom had said, if that bodies trapping a big U.S. navy ship part of the story could possibly be true. Really? Perhaps he’d seen lots of bodies certainly…but so many they trapped a huge Navy ship? Madness if it will strike, strikes young men around the age he was, so perhaps it would have happened to him anyway.
Or…not…
At the botched assault on Tarawa Atoll, one coxswain at the helm of a landing vessel went quite mad, perhaps at the shock of steering through all the severed heads and limbs near the shore…
It wasn’t an a-bomb that did that either. So just imagine the aftermath of the first plutonium bomb, small as they say that one was, compared to what nuclear weapons can do nowadays. Reading this Atlantic article I see now it probably was exactly as mom had said. So her sailor boyfriend became lost in madness. So some years later on the pier at Avalon she met my dad and they married. So now here I am, writing this.
So many people died in that war…many from the two atomic bomb blasts alone. Every year they toll the bells in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the a-bomb dead. And every year it’s been in the back of my thoughts always to wonder if I was born because of one of those atomic bombs. But that war violently changed a great many lives, and I am certainly not the only war baby ever born, who but for war would not be.
I think if partners want to have the opportunity to live together, I don’t have a problem with that…
Trois…
And I think that’s where most of America is.
Quatre…
So I think that you know, you have to speak from the heart about these issues.
Cinq…
They are very personal.
Six…
They have a significant impact on an awful lot of people…
Sept…
…and the less the government is telling people what to do, the better off we’re all going to be.
Huit…
….partners living together, I don’t have a problem with.
Neuf…
Question: Now that you’re trying to occupy the political center, are you still in favor of a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage? Governor Crist: I feel the same way, yes, because I feel that marriage is a sacred institution, if you will.
Ken Mehlman, former republican party chair, is out and proud. Well…out anyway…
Ex-GOP national chairman Ken Mehlman says he’s gay
Mehlman, manager of the 2004 Bush/Cheney re-election campaign, came out to Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic. “It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” Mehlman said in the interview. “Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey and for me over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues and current colleagues and they’ve been wonderful and supportive.”
The article goes on to say Mehlman wants to work for same-sex marriage. That would be helpful. Mehlman worked for years to get anti-gay bigots elected. He ran the reelection campaign of Bush The Junior, waving the gay scarecrow at voters despite the fact that he himself was one…
But he was, and probably still is, a party loyalist, and as Garrison Keillor said after Norm Coleman won in the almost-as-ugly 2002 election (which also saw Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran loose to slimeball Saxby Chambliss), they are Republicans first and Americans second. If the party tells you it wants to put a knife in your back, you offer to do it yourself as a show of loyalty.
“Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” Mehlman said at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
This was happening back when some pundits were thinking republicans could peel some of the black vote away from the democratic party on social (read: anti-gay) issues, which makes Mehlman’s offering this apology more then a little grotesque. But if all you’re noticing about this is its tang of political opportunism, you’re missing that he’s offering this apology for deliberately polarizing the nation to win elections, just a year after they’d waged the most homophobic campaign in American history. Here’s a cartoon I did at the time…
That was the summer I stood in a protest line outside an ex-gay ministry in Memphis Tennessee, where a gay teen had been committed against his will by his own parents. There I heard the stories of other gay kids and young adults either forced into ex-gay therapy or on their own because they were terrified of being homosexual, in a climate of anti-gay fear, loathing and hate ginned up over the years by among others, Ken Mehlman. He had an election to win you see, and never mind the damage done to this country in the process. Neighbor had to hate neighbor. Parents had to loath their own flesh and blood, children had to see that loathing in the faces of their own fathers and mothers, and remember having seen it for the rest of their lives, so George Bush could be president. To the party loyalist the ends justify the means. You must be willing to destroy some families, to win an election on Family Values.
I’m glad Mehlman is finally at some sort of inner peace with the person he is. For one thing, people who are disgusted with their sexual nature, gay or straight, tend to take that disgust out on others. But no one, not even Republican’s first and Americans second, should feel forced to live their lives in the closet. But it isn’t unreasonable to expect those republicans to work a little harder now to make this an America where nobody else has to either. There’s a lot of damage out there, with their names on it.
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