So with Jan. 6 come and gone, everybody seems to have taken down their Christmas lights. We have an Epiphany and the world gets darker — that seems backwards.
At Saturday night’s Republican debate, Mike Huckabee used a word he emphasizes quite a bit: “vertical.”
“I think we also ought to recognize that what Senator Obama has done is to touch at the core of something Americans want,” Huckabee said. “They are so tired of everything being horizontal — left, right, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican. They’re looking for vertical leadership that leads up, not down. He has excited a lot of voters in this country. Let’s pay respect for that. He’s a likable person who has excited people about wanting to vote who have not voted in the past.”
A few hours earlier, Josh Marshall noted that “vertical” is a Huckabee favorite, with the former governor’s website arguing, “I think the country is looking for somebody who is vertical.”
Can anyone explain what the hell that means? Vertical? I guess if you’re main opponent was Fred Thompson you might push the fact that you spend most of your time standing up. But seriously, is there something I’m missing here? Or is this the weirdest campaign I’ve ever heard?
What Marshall was missing was one of the current fundamentalist tropes. He wouldn’t know, because he doesn’t live in that stifling environment…
This probably won’t come as too big a surprise given Huckabee’s faith-based campaigning, but this “vertical” talk seems to have dog-whistle implications.
This is definitely dog-whistle politics — that is, a message delivered in coded terminology and targeted to a particular subcultural group. Conservative evangelicals often talk about the need to prioritize their vertical relationships with God first and foremost before worrying about horizontal relationships among people. It’s the individualized “get right with God” approach of conservative Protestantism.
In contrast, progressive people of faith reject the vertical-horizontal dichotomy as a false one, saying that in interpersonal relationships one’s faith and spiritual teachings are made manifest. Such an outlook is wishy-washy, watered-down liberal theology in the minds of conservative evangelicals. Southern Baptist minister Huckabee knows this, and speaks evangelical-ese with his words. In fact, he’s got it up on his website as well.
I know this is so because I’ve been present a number of times when “vertical” rhetoric — the exact word — has been used in evangelical circles. It’s indeed a way of speaking one hears in many churches, part of the faith vocabulary of the evangelical and fundamentalist subculture.
And from “The God Strategy: How Religion Became A Political Weapon in America”:
That’s the power of narrowcasting. Targeted, under-the-radar messages denote who is part of the club. It’s like a secret handshake, writ large and electoral: politicians who narrowcast religious cues are assigned considerable credibility by voters in the targeted constituency.
Something to keep an eye on.
Andrew Sullivan, who is no Huckabee fan, was quoting Rod Dreher, who admits now that he was bamboozled by Bush and is ready to be bamboozled now by Huckabee…
I don’t get why Andrew calls Huckabee’s rise a sign of "the perils of fundamentalist politics." For one, Huckabee is not a fundamentalist. He’s more of a Rick Warren Evangelical…
No, and No. If he’s not actually a theocrat, he’s certainly willing to give actual theocrats everything they want so long as they get him elected. Jim Burroway, as always, has done some homework on his past, and the folks he likes to hang out with…
We reported earlier on Southern Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s fundraising event at the home of Houston multimillionaire Steven Hotze, a well-known Christian Reconstructionist. Pastor Rick Scarborough, who also maintains Reconstructionist beliefs, was there as well. Since then, we’ve learned that Huckabee’s ties go far deeper than mere acquaintances and financial backers. He has a history of working very closely with some very well-known Reconstructionists over the years. In this report, we will examine two of Huckabee’s closest Reconstructionist colleagues.
Go read the whole thing. There is no mistaking Huckabee for what he is. It’ll be interesting to see if the corporate news media, which is horrified at the prospect of a Huckabee nomination, actually delves into any of this…
The use of the insecure NEDAP voting computer which has proven to be susceptible to manipulation is not contested in Hesse only.
By taking this step, the CCC [The Chaos Computer Club] is attempting to bring about a voting procedure that is reliable and plausible for all voters before the state elections on 27th January. Recourse to the court has become necessary since the Hesse state government evidently does not have the required expert knowledge to understand the technical security and transparency flaws of the voting machines, nor the will to act accordingly.
This comes from Germany, where state elections are scheduled to be held later this month. So Europe is having to deal with the same voting machine bullshit we are here in the U.S. now. But this is interesting…a commenter on Slashdot says…
Interestingly the main argument in the case at hand is NOT that the machines are faulty or can be manipulated.
Until now elections in germany are held in public. This means that anybody can come in and watch the votes beeing counted. However with the voting machines used the people are requested to believe the government that they operate correctly. This trust should be based on secret reviews of the machines hard and software conducted by the government.
I really love this approach to the court challenge! I hope they succeed. Yes. Yes. Voting needs to be absolutely positively transparent. Whatever the outcome of an election, everyone needs to know that the vote was fair. I’ve said it before…
Canada uses paper ballots. Yeah, they’re a smaller country, but that only means we have more people available to make it work here too. Yeah, it’s a lot of work. But do you want to keep your democracy or not? Nothing is more important then a fair and honest vote. Nothing is more important then everyone generally knows the vote was fair and honest. You win, you loose, there is always the next election. When the votes stop being counted, when trust is lost in the voting process, there may be no next election. Paper trails are not the answer. There must be No Software in the process.
…and I can’t say it often enough: Paper Ballots! Paper Ballots!
The trouble with having Bill Kristol as a New York Times columnist is not just that he’s prone to saying substantive things about the issues that I disagree with. He’s also the kind of guy who when he goes out on a weird limb and says Mike Huckabee would have a good chance of winning in a general election, you immediately start wondering why he’s saying that.
"Because he believes it" doesn’t tend to rank very high on the list. That’s his rep, and based on his record it seems like a deserved rep. But when you read your morning paper and find yourself wondering why, exactly, its authors are trying to mislead you, then your morning paper is suddenly not so useful.
Duh! I used to read the morning paper religiously. Haven’t touched one in years…literally years. Same with the evening network news. Even as my TV time began to dwindle, I always kept my evening appointment with the network news. No more. And I’m in that age group who supposedly are still mostly regular newspaper readers, and network news viewers.
Psychologists have found that thought patterns used to recall the past and imagine the future are strikingly similar. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to show the brain at work, they have observed the same regions activated in a similar pattern whenever a person remembers an event from the past or imagines himself in a future situation…
For some, the best hope of ‘seeing’ the future leads them to seek guidance — perhaps from an astrologist. But it’s not very scientific. Now, psychologists at Washington University are finding that your ability to envision the future does in fact goes hand-in-hand with remembering the past. Both processes spark similar neural activity in the brain.
"You might look at it as mental time travel–the ability to take thoughts about ourselves and project them either into the past or into the future," says Kathleen McDermott, Ph.D. and Washington University psychology professor. The team used "functional magnetic resonance imaging" — or fMRI — to "see" brain activity. They asked college students to recall past events and then envision themselves experiencing such an event in their future. The results? Similar areas of the brain "lit up" in both scenarios.
"We’re taking these images from our memories and projecting them into novel future scenarios," says psychology professor Karl Szpunar.
Most scientists believed thinking about the future was a process occurring solely in the brain’s frontal lobe. But the fMRI data showed a variety of brain areas were activated when subjects dreamt of the future.
"All the regions that we know are important for memory are just as important when we imagine our future," Szpunar says.
Researchers say besides furthering their understanding of the brain — the findings may help research into amnesia, a curious psychiatric phenomenon. In addition to not being able to remember the past, most people who suffer from amnesia cannot envision or visualize what they’ll be doing in the future — even the next day.
I’ve always found charming, the head on collision between George Santayana’s "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" and Shaw’s "We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future". All my life I’ve intuited that remembrance and imagination, which is the key to any future you may hope to have, were inseparably interlocked chunks of a personality, and to turn away from one would be essentally to kick the legs out from beneath the other, and leave you just an empty shell walking zombie like in the present. And actually, I see a lot of people in this world who seem to be doing just that.
I am not living in the past. I am living with it. Sometimes it’s a struggle. But it’s the life I have and I can’t go forward without taking it with me. Nobody does.
Just so this is clear, if isn’t already, whoever the democratic candidate is this November, I’m almost certainly voting for them. I’ve basically been a yellow dog democrat ever since Connie Morella, an ersatz moderate republican from Montgomery County Maryland voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. That was when I learned that there is no such thing as a moderate republican. So whoever wins the democratic nomination…unless they do something really crazy and nominate Lyndon LaRouche or Mike Huckabee…I’ll be voting for them. I can’t say there’s a lot of them I like…and yes, yes, they’re mostly pretty lame on gay rights issues, and in particular on same sex marriage…but I have been convinced, ever since Connie Morella whined for the newspapers that same sex marriage was "too much" and "like the world turning upside down", that the only way gay people will ever achieve equality in America, is when the republicans are too weak to oppose it effectively.
What I’ve learned since George Bush was installed in the white house by a republican supreme court, is that it isn’t only homosexuals the republican party hates. They hate our democracy at least as much if not more then they hate gay people. The tut, tutting of the republican cocktail party set as to how they’re really all a very socially tolerant bunch they only want their tax breaks and deregulation is a pathetic charade next to the passionate vitriol of the grassroots, who are screaming for theocracy. Witness the horror of the republican establishment over Mike Huckabee.
Wealthy Republicans have a new political nightmare that may be scarier than Hillary Clinton: Mike Huckabee.
The former Arkansas governor has surged in Republican presidential-preference polls, winning the support of Christian fundamentalists while peppering his campaign rhetoric with jabs at the financial industry. He calls himself the candidate who isn’t a “wholly owned subsidiary” of investment banks, decries large executive-pay packages and says the party needs to shift its focus from Wall Street to Main Street.
In doing so, he threatens the uneasy if effective coalition Republicans have counted on for three decades: abortion opponents and other social-issue activists supplying foot soldiers, proponents of tax cuts and business-friendly regulatory policies putting up the money and getting the biggest economic benefits.
"Huckabee puts this long-simmering feud between the social-conservative wing and the country-club and business crowd into starker contrast," said Stuart Rothenberg, publisher of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report in Washington.
Huckabee was asked on TV after running his Christmas ad, with it’s glowing cross resting on his shoulder as though he was annointed by Jesus Christ himself…
…if he was running to be president of all America, or president of Christian America. Of course he made noises about being president of all the people…even the aberrant homosexuals. But there’s no doubt about him. He is a republican to the bone. But what you have to understand is that so are his horrified cocktail party circuit critics.
I’ll put this in language even your tiny little Iowa brains can understand: What the f*** is wrong with you people?
The news coming out of Des Moines (literally, French for “tell me about the rabbits, George”) tonight is distressing in the extreme. 32 years ago, your Democratic brethren took one look at Jimmy Carter — the worst 20th Century President bar Nixon, and the worst ex-President ever — and declared, “That’s our man!”
Three decades later, and along comes Mike Huckabee. Same moral pretentiousness, same gullibility on foreign affairs, only-slightly-less toothy idiot’s grin. Then you so-called Republicans took a look at Carter’s clone and said, “That’s our man, too!”
And by a pretty wide margin. […]
Mike Huckabee? Really? We’ve seen this game before, and its name is… every other single stupid, un-winnable candidate you’ve ever picked — which is most of them.
So I repeat the question: What is wrong with you people?
All my love, you corn-sucking idiots,
VodkaPundit
He’s since taken that post down. Never let the vodka do your talking for you, eh? But as Brad at Sadly No says, Feel The Love…
Yes. Feel it. There’s the face of the republican party both these men share, right there. There is it’s "base" It isn’t fundamentalism. It’s Hate. Sometimes, that snarling pack of wolves turns on each other for a while, but never, Never mistake that as the party tearing itself apart. That’s how it gets stronger. Ever since Goldwater, excepting Ford and, maybe, Dole, the one who wins the republican nomination, is the one with the most ruthless machine. These pack fights the republicans go through during the primaries, are merely the warm up to the general election, when the one still left standing, the most vicious one, turns from the internal battle, and looks out at America.
To the degree that the defining characteristics of fundamentalism aren’t so much its piety as its loathings, its resentments, and its sullen sense of entitlement, Huckabee is certainly playing to the fundamentalists. To the degree that fundamentalist theocracies are nothing more at heart then degenerate oligarchies that claim God’s authority more brazenly and less sincerely then any king that ever lived, then yes, what they want is theocracy. But don’t mistake Huckabee’s support as being a religious movement, any more then the CEOs pouring millions into republican coffers in exchange for billions in tax dollars is a religious movement. These two sides of the republican party coalition are more in tune with each other then people think. They both hate American democracy. They both think the American dream of liberty and justice for all is an obscene joke. They both want to rape America to lifelessness: the one out of hate toward the hoi polli; the other out of hate for humanity.
Hate is their motive, and hate is their practice. For decades now, ever since Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and southern democrats began fleeing to the republican party, that party has been doggedly remaking itself from a co-governing institution into a movement that seeks nothing more then power, at any cost, by any means necessary, and to hell with the consequences for America. As Garrison Keillor pointedly observed after the 2000 election debacle, they are republicans first, and Americans second. Actually, I don’t think they regard themselves as Americans in the sense Keillor means that word, as a national identity we all share. Modern movement conservative republicans believe that America belongs exclusively to them…the rest of us just work here. Liberals… Democrats… Progressives… Gays… Uppity women… Uppity Negros… Trade Unionists… Urbanites… Intellectuals… Christians in deed as well as word… The working stiff holding down two jobs to pay the rent… The successful entrepreneur who wants everyone to have their own piece of the American Dream too… As far as the republicans are concerned, we are all illegal aliens.
For those of us who’ve been seeing that clearly since 2000, it makes the beltway pundocracy’s swooning over the virtues of "bipartisanship" particularly galling. Bipartisanship in the Bush era, is giving the republicans what they want. Here Glenn Sargent explains:
By now, you’ve probably heard that Michael Bloomberg and a bunch of retired politicians are going to hold a summit at the University of Oklahoma this week to talk about how desperately the nation needs a nonpartisan and independent leader like, you know, him to come in and lead the nation out of partisan gridlock.
This story, fittingly, was first leaked to The Washington Post‘s David Broder, a St. Paul-like figure who has long preached the virtues of the Beltway Gospel of Bipartisanship high and low across the land. Predictably, this planned gathering is already garnering the sort of awed and respectful coverage that greeted the formation of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group nearly two years ago.
So here’s the question: When these bearded elders descend on Oklahoma later this week, will anyone ask them what policies they stand for, beyond "breaking partisan gridlock"? Will anyone ask them where they stand on the issues? Will anyone ask why we’re supposed to believe that their actual stances have any chance of creating "bipartisan unity" at all?
These questions are kind of relevant. Partisan gridlock happens because people — and by extension, political parties — disagree about stuff. One party wants to do one thing on a particular issue. Another party says No. The first party offers a few concessions. The second party still says No. That’s where "partisan gridlock" comes from — underlying disagreement on issues — and in our current case, the fault for our "partisan gridlock" isn’t equally distributed between the two parties. Rather, it’s almost exclusively the fault of the Republicans.
You aren’t allowed to say this, but it’s true. If you don’t believe me, ask the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. They proposed a bunch of solutions to Iraq. The Democrats largely embraced these solutions. The Republicans, by contrast, didn’t. As a result, the ISG’s proposals didn’t happen — even though they had been authored by a distinguished bipartisan panel. The Republicans have been the near-exclusive cause of gridlock on multiple other issues, too — issues upon which there is already majority agreement on how to proceed. In reality, the best way to end partisan gridlock is to further weaken the Republican Party, which is tying government in knots and preventing it from carrying out the will of the majority on a host of fronts.
This is how the republicans have managed to govern even when they were out of power, with democrats shuffling along to their tune out of a sense of national unity and co-operation that has been hopelessly naive, if not utterly reckless for decades. While democrats have been searching for peace in our time, the republicans have been waging all out political war on our precious democracy.
And that makes questions of any democratic candidate’s "electability" moot. Glenn Greenwald lays it out Here:
There’s a prevailing sense that Obama is not as offensive to the right-wing GOP faction as other Democratic and liberal candidates in the past have been, or that he’s less "divisive" among them than Hillary. And that’s true: for now, while he tries to take down the individual who has long provoked the most intense hatred — literally — among the Right. But anyone who doesn’t think that that’s all going to change instantaneously if Obama is the nominee hasn’t been watching how this faction operates over the last 20 years. Hatred is their fuel. Just look at the bottomless personal animus they managed to generate over an anemic, mundane, inoffensive figure like John Kerry. At their Convention, they waved signs with band-aids mocking his purple hearts while cheering on two combat-avoiders.
There will be more than enough of that intense hatred to go around if Obama is the nominee. For now, most of the racial commentary about Obama’s candidacy on the Right is confined to the sort of cringe-inducing, painfully condescending self-congratulations of the type Bill Bennett spat out on CNN Thursday night:
Barack Hussein Obama, a black man, wins this for the Democrats.
I have been watching him. I watched him on "Meet the Press," I’ve watched him on [Anderson Cooper’s] show, watched him on all the CNN shows — he never brings race into it. He never plays the race card.
Talk about the black community — he has taught the black community you don’t have to act like Jesse Jackson, you don’t have to act like Al Sharpton. You can talk about the issues. Great dignity. And this is a breakthrough. And good for the people of Iowa.
But if Obama is really the nominee, and is the one standing in the way between the Right and ongoing control of the Government, the idea that there’s going to be civility and respect is pure delusion. Rush Limbaugh’s continuous race-based mockery of Obama and the types of "warnings" issued here by Goldberg and Reynolds of the social unrest "Obama supporters" will cause is but the tip of the rancid iceberg [just the other day, Reynolds promoted a post warning that an Obama win (like a Huckabee win) will mean "the jihadis will not have done too badly"]. From a Free Republic posting after Obama’s Iowa victory:
Is Hussein Obama the weakest Dem for the General election?
By sending forth Hussein Osama out of Iowa, Democrats have unwittingly weakened their general election prospects.
Hussein’s exotic mixture of radical liberalism, Kwanzaa Socialism, antipathy towards the unborn, and weakness against his jihadi brethren will all come back to destroy him against almost any Republican opponent, even the snake-grope from Hope. . . .
As defenders of this great Republic, and of the pinnacle of Western civilization that it represents, we should all come together tonight and agree on a common strategy that will keep the White House from becoming a madrassa.
As Andrew White, who also posted that Free Republic piece, wrote: "If Obama continues and becomes the presumptive Democratic nominee (and his chances got a lot better last night) it is going to get ugly. Real ugly." It would be just as ugly with Clinton or Edwards as the nominee, but that’s the point. Scare tactics and fear-mongering are all the Right knows, and their whole electoral strategy since Richard Nixon has been grounded in culturally tribalistic and racial appeals. The kind of subtle bile pouring forth from Limbaugh, and from Goldberg and Reynolds last night, is just a tiny preview of what is to come.
The fact is that the democrats could nominate Jesus Christ and two weeks into the campaign the Washington Post’s editorial page would be asking why he isn’t being candid with the voters about his horns, cloven hoofs and tail.
Which makes it tempting to simply vote for the candidate who pisses them off the most. Hey…why not Hillery…they just Hate Hillery… But that’s letting your anger do your thinking for you, and what we need to do is let our anger Inform our thinking, but not substitute for it. Whether or not a particular candidate pisses our enemies off isn’t important. What’s important is that they fight back. Thats what we should be looking for in our candidate. What’s important is that they’ll take the fight to the republicans. What’s important, is that they’ll swing right back every time the republican slime machine attacks, and keep right on swinging, Hard and Fast and Furious, no matter how loudly the republican corporate news media accuses them of “partisanship”, “negativism” and “political warfare”. What’s important is that they grab the other side by the throat and kick it in the ass, and keep on kicking it in the ass all through the election, and from one end of their term in office to the other, until the opposition either stops swinging and starts acting like civilized human beings again, or it can’t swing anymore, whichever comes first.
To which the Andrew Sullivan’s and Glenn Reynolds will say that all we democrats and liberals are interested in is waging a political war, rather then finding solutions to American’s problems. And the only proper response to that is: Kiss My Ass. No decent person goes looking for a knife fight. But the fact is we Are in a knife fight with the republicans. The fact is that America Has been in a knife fight with the republicans for decades now. And you don’t bring a handshake to a knife fight.
Most of the Western press had evacuated, but a small contingent remained to report on the crumbling Iraqi regime. In the New York offices of NBC News, one of my video stories was being screened. If it made it through the screening, it would be available for broadcast later that evening. Producer Geoff Stephens and I had done a phone interview with a reporter in Baghdad who was experiencing the bombing firsthand. We also had a series of still photos of life in the city. The only communication with Baghdad in those early days was by satellite phone. Still pictures were sent back over the few operating data links.
Our story arranged pictures of people coping with the bombing into a slide show, accompanied by the voice of Melinda Liu, a Newsweek reporter describing, over the phone, the harrowing experience of remaining in Baghdad. The outcome of the invasion was still in doubt. There was fear in the reporter’s voice and on the faces of the people in the pictures. The four-minute piece was meant to be the kind of package that would run at the end of an hour of war coverage. Such montages were often used as "enders," to break up the segments of anchors talking live to field reporters at the White House or the Pentagon, or retired generals who were paid to stand on in-studio maps and provide analysis of what was happening. It was also understood that without commercials there would need to be taped pieces on standby in case an anchor needed to use the bathroom. Four minutes was just about right.
At the conclusion of the screening, there were a few suggestions for tightening here and clarification there. Finally, an NBC/GE executive responsible for "standards" shook his head and wondered about the tone in the reporter’s voice. "Doesn’t it seem like she has a point of view here?" he asked.
There was silence in the screening room. It made me want to twitch, until I spoke up. I was on to something but uncertain I wasn’t about to be handed my own head. "Point of view? What exactly do you mean by point of view?" I asked. "That war is bad? Is that the point of view that you are detecting here?"
The story never aired. Maybe it was overtaken by breaking news, or maybe some pundit-general went long, or maybe an anchor was able to control his or her bladder. On the other hand, perhaps it was never aired because it contradicted the story NBC was telling. At NBC that night, war was, in fact, not bad. My remark actually seemed to have made the point for the "standards" person. Empathy for the civilians did not fit into the narrative of shock and awe.
The facts didn’t fit the narrative…so the facts were jettisoned. This is how the corporate news media operates. I’ve asked this before…let me ask it again: what is more degenerate…a the puppet news media of a totalitarian state, or a news media in a democracy that sells out?
A barn owl has been entrusted with a very special task at a wedding – flying in the rings for the bride and groom.
Three-year-old Casber will swoop down the aisle to give the rings to the best man at the wedding of bird owner Islwyn Jones’s daughter Jenni in Denbighshire.
So I’ve finally plugged in all the register chits from my Key West road trip, and the total bill comes to $2,119.39. The bulk of that being hotel costs, and the bulk of That being the high cost of lodgings in the Florida Keys…at least during Christmas week. I paid $746.99 for lodgings in Key Largo and Key West over three nights…one night in Key Largo at $222.95 and two in Key West at $524.04 and those were the best rates I could find in AAA rated two-diamond minimum motels with Internet connectivity. By comparison, the motel I stayed at in Orlando only charged me $57 for a night, and the Microtel I stayed at in Georgia on the way home only cost $78.39. Btw…I Highly recommend Microtel. The beds are comfortable, the rooms are very small, but sensibly laid out…and Quiet.
Total gas bill came to 324.36. Food was a total of 303.67, but I ate well while I was in Key West, and since I found out someone very special to me works as a waiter nowadays, I’ve been tipping pretty extravagantly. Normally while on the road I’m splurging if I spend more then $15 a day on food. I just don’t eat much. But the eating was just wonderful in Key West.
There were some miscellaneous expenses that all told came to $361.76. I had to buy a new camera strap for the 30D when the old leather one I had on it suddenly broke. Luckily the camera itself was undamaged. I bought several new caps…some sandals when I finally saw a pair I actually liked in Key West…and the cutest little Gay Rainbow Micky Mouse pin you ever saw at Disneyworld. If Disney isn’t officially supporting Gay Days, they’re sure making us feel welcome there nonetheless. And there was this really eyeball burning tye-dye hooded sweatshirt I saw in Key West that I just had to have…
So…about a week and a day, and it cost me just over two-grand. That’s about a grand more then I was hoping to get away with. I have to start planning these things a little more carefully. But note, the cost of gasoline was still not a very big factor here. In fact, gas and food Combined were less then the hotel costs.
And this trip I didn’t spend anything on photographic film, because I still have a lot of unexposed black and white and color film I haven’t used yet (and didn’t either on this trip…everything I shot this trip was digital…)
I need to turn one of my savings accounts into a road trip kitty…and just not go anywhere until I’ve got at least two-grand in it…
In commemoration of the Black Cat raid of 1966, celebrate this New Year’s Eve with a radical act. Kiss him "on the mouth for three to five seconds."
You should immediately go read his entire post about a page of gay history I hadn’t known about…
It all began exactly forty years ago this New Year’s Eve, on Sunset Blvd., in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, in a small bar called the Black Cat. There were some sixty or seventy patrons gathered during those final moments of 1966, counting down the last few seconds to midnight. Couples gathered and stood next to each other, and as the countdown approached zero, they leaned into one other, and, amid the shouts of “Happy New Year!” and the opening strands of Auld Lang Syne, they did something all couples do all around the world.
They kissed.
And immediately at least six plainclothes officers who had infiltrated the gay bar began viciously beating and arresting the kissing offenders. As the melee widened, several people tried to escape to the nearby New Faces bar. Undercover officers followed and raided that bar as well. One of the New Faces workers was beaten so badly by police that they cracked a rib, fractured his skull and ruptured his spleen.
Six Black Cat kissers were tried and convicted of “lewd or dissolute conduct” in a public place, conduct that consisted of male couples hugging and kissing. According to one police report, one couple had “kissed on the mouth for three to five seconds.” Apparently, three to five seconds are what constituted “lewd or dissolute conduct” among the LAPD.
If I’ve heard bigots say once that they don’t care what we do "in our bedrooms" just don’t "flaunt it" in front of them, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And what is this "it" they’re so afraid of seeing? It isn’t that we’ll suddenly start having sex on the sidewalk in front of them. They’d care a lot less about us doing that even, then doing the one thing they simply don’t want to see, don’t want to know: that the objects of their hate are human after all. That we don’t simply rut, that homosexuality isn’t a lower form of lust, but that we are whole people, who not only desire, but love, and are loved.
If there is anything the bigots hate seeing us do more then holding the hand of the one we love, it’s kissing them affectionately, simply, lovingly. They’d hate us a lot less if all they ever saw in us was desire, because that would validate their ignorant barstool conceits that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. You want to really get them pissed off, make them see red, make the veins in their pasty foreheads start throbbing, let them see the slightest hint, the smallest sign, that you actually love your intimate other. Because that makes you fully human and that’s the last thing they want to know. What was the first thing the bigots started babbling about after the supreme court overturned the sodomy laws? Not that suddenly a lot of homosexuals would start having sex, but that acknowledging that we had a right to sexual intimacy, might lead to giving us the right to marriage too. Marriage was the First thing they started yapping about.
That says it all. That really nailed down what this fight is really about, what it was always about right from the beginning. It isn’t about sex. It has nothing to do with sex. It has everything to do with our human spirit. Homosexuals cannot have love, we must be denied it at every turn, every door to it must be slammed shut in our faces, it must be beaten out of us if necessary, because to allow us love, is to acknowledge that we are human beings, with human souls. And so long as we must play the roll of scapegoats for the moral failings of heterosexuals, that cannot be.
Burroway concludes with this, and I couldn’t agree more…
Forty years after the Black Cat raid, men still cannot be seen kissing each other, unless ratings are tanking during the final season or one of them dies.
And yet, what are two lovers supposed to do?
And when two lovers woo
They still say, “I love you.”
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.
Go read the whole thing. And when the New Year rings in, if you’re lucky enough to have found your other half, or even just a happy partner for the moment, take them into your arms and kiss them…
Kiss him for all of those who were not allowed to kiss. Kiss him for those who were beaten and arrested for kissing, and for those who fought back to defend that kiss. Kiss him for those heroes who declared an end to the shame of kissing. Kiss him because now you can; because today your greatest freedom is in that kiss. Kiss him on the mouth. And for good measure, kiss him for much, much longer than three to five seconds. Kiss him hard and long, with a kiss of forty years and still counting.
Somehow, I’ve no idea how or why, I’m able to keep my common sense when I’m completely wasted. I may not be able to stand up straight but I know better then to fall for items seven through 2. But item number one has actually made sense to me when I was badly drunk. Regrettably.
It’s good to know where your failure points are. Take heed of them when partying tonight…
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.
