For people like me, Senator Craig is, in a very obvious sense, an enemy: he has been a solid functionary of the system of hatred which has used people like me as a wedge issue to frighten people into acquiescence with other, and far more serious forms of evildoing. A system of hatred which is, thank heavens, far less strong in this country now than it is in the United States, and far less strong than it was in this country as recently as fifteen years ago. I say this, since there is an obvious sense in which I, as a child of my culture, am tempted to rejoice in the discomfiture of my enemy, to depict Senator Craig as the “not me” which gives me a tidy little identity. It was in this context that I was very moved to read a piece by one of the gay-bloggers in the US, fairly shortly after the Craig story broke, which helped remind me of the truth of the Gospel.
This blogger, whose name I cannot now remember, showed me something which enabled me to see sameness rather than difference.
He pointed out that Senator Craig was born in 1945, in rural Idaho. When he was ten years old, in 1955, there was a scandal in Boise, the Idaho State Capital, not too far from where young Larry lived. It was the big tabloid gay scandal of the 1950’s, coming just as America was in the grip of the McCarthy witch hunts, themselves helped along nicely by at least two self-hating gay men, “killer fruits” as Truman Capote wrily called them: Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover. It was revealed that in Boise, of all unlikely places, there was a network of public officials and influential citizens employing the services of a group of rent boys. Well, you can imagine what sort of impact the news of all this, the sensation of it, the hatred it revealed, might have had on a ten year old boy. It might well have taught him that if he wanted to grow up being good, then the one thing, above all else, that he was not, was gay (or whatever approximation to that word existed in his milieu at that time). A boy like that might well have been taught by his culture, just as he came close to puberty, simultaneously who he was, and who he was not; and faced with any little boy’s desire to grow up to be good, he may have been locked into a form of denial and self-hatred which could then perpetuate itself for many years thereafter.
I can’t be sure, but I think that nameless gay blogger was probably me, Here. At the time I was seeing some references to the issues Craig’s generation faced, but I’d also previously seen announcements come around one of the gay news lists I’m on about the Fall of ’55 Documentary, which reminded me of the book, Sex Crime Panic, about another one that happened, also in 1955, in Soux City Iowa, and I did a quick mental calculation of how old Craig probably was at the time of the scandal in his home state and sure enough there he was, just at the threshold of puberty when all of this was going down. That generation had it a lot rougher then mine even, I’m about ten years younger then Craig, but some gay kids growing up in some parts of the country back then had it worse, if that’s possible to imagine.
The web’s a big place and who knows how many other gay bloggers, knowing about that documentary or about that scandal independently figured out its link with Larry Craig’s life and posted their thoughts for Alison to read, but nobody else I’d read up ’til I posted my piece as the story was developing had, or took the time to figure exactly how old he would have been. I don’t get the kind of hits per day that Sullivan gets, or even the third or forth tier gay bloggers get, but I have have regular and semi-regular readers here, and many others who stop in via Google every day, and I see lots of email links in my server logs, as people find things here on the blog, and on my cartoon pages, that they want to share with others. The point is, who knows where a thought that you put down in writing will go here on the web?
This is what the Internet has done for us, for the political and cultural dialogue among the everyday folk. With so many active and curious minds roaming around the web to stumble across and behold the links between people and events that animate our times, we don’t have to wait for some Old Media gasbags to tell us what the connections are. We find them, and ponder them for ourselves.
Someone calling themselves Mrs du Toit responds to my post yesterday on the Nazification Of The Western Male. I’ve no way of establishing the authenticity of the commenter, but I reply back in the comments.
Nothing much to say. You may have already noticed the Twitter box I’ve installed at the top of the right sidebar (when it’s working…right now it apparently isn’t because Twitter is doing some sort of upgrade…). Other then twittering I’m not much in a talkative mood right now. Just de-stressing with my brother here in Oceano…wishing I could live here all year long.
It’s the end of July and you need a light jacket in the mornings here. It stays cool, but not cold, all year long here. Mornings here by the Pacific coast everything’s covered in dew. Most mornings there is a light fog. By noon the fog is gone most days and it’s blue sky and sunshine and mild temperatures. That’s the climate here. All year long.
Cute guys here too. Way too good looking for my own good. Too bad there’s no IT work here for me. But if there was IT work around anywhere near Oceano or Pismo or Arroyo Grande then the price of housing here would be insane, as opposed to merely delusional.
Due to a sudden and severe increase in my comment spam, I’ve increased the level of comment moderation a tad here. If you’ve previously left a comment here you should be able to keep commenting without difficulty. If you haven’t you’ll probably see a message saying I need to approve it before it will appear. Also, if your comment has more then one hyperlink in it you’ll also get that message.
Hopefully this will take care of the problem. If not I’ll have to hold all comments for moderation. If the level of comment spam goes back to normal levels I’ll reduce the moderation level again.
Fred Clark’s Slacktivist bloggot an R rating from the same nutty blog rating thing that gave me my NC-17. Fred is a liberal Baptist and one of the most decent people I’ve ever met. He regularly tackles spiritual and theological issues on his blog, and he’s been doing a really killer ongoing review of the first book in the Left Behind series. His blog got the R for excessive use of the words Missionary, Hell, and Death. Oh…and Dick…but that Fred says, was in a post about the Vice President.
My friend Jon was explaining to me the other day that he’d had a hard time directing people to A Coming Out Story, in conversations where he couldn’t actually give someone a link, because it was buried a tad deep in the structure of my web site. He’d tell them to go to my main page at brucegarrett.com, but from there it wasn’t obvious how to get to A Coming Out Story. he suggested a link right off the main home page, which I did a little while ago (and I added one to the left column here). But that brought me back to mind about how I’d been wanting to restructure the cartoon page generally.
I’ve been needing to give some of my other cartoon formats their own pages here for a while now. I’ve been tossing out these little cartoons onto the blog that never fit on the political cartoon page, or anywhere else. Some multi-panel stuff with Mark and Josh, and just some random fun stuff like Sergeant Stoneface – Love Detective. They all needed their own pages.
So now they have them, and the cartoon page, instead of being only for the political cartoons (which you may have noticed I’m not doing that much of these days…) is now a central jumping off point to get to all the others. The political cartoon page has it’s own link off the cartoon page now, as does A Coming Out Story and Mark and Josh’s cartoons and a miscellaneous Fun page where all the random fun stuff will go. All the existing links to individual cartoon pages should still work and not be broken. But if you come across a broken link please let me know about it and I’ll fix it as soon as I can get to it.
So the morning after our Forth of July party, Jon and I are out getting a bite to eat at Panera Bread, a nearby sandwich shop. Jon is still playing with his new iPhone, and he wants to see how well it works with the free wireless hotspot at Panera Bread.
We sit down to a light breakfast (really light for me because I’m still feeling a tad hungover from the previous night…), and Jon calls up a few items on the Safari browser built into the iPhone. Then for kicks and grins he tries to call up my web site. But the wireless at Panera Bread blocks it, with a message that my site is being blocked because its content is pornographic.
WTF??? The most risqué this site gets is on the cartoon prologue to my cartoon series A Coming Out Story, where I talk about the time my straight high school pals dragged me to see my first X-rated movie. I’d give the content of that one an R rating at best. I just don’t do X. X is obvious. I don’t do obvious, I don’t feel comfortable treating sex that way. It isn’t me. (There’s a reason why the character of my Libido in A Coming Out Story is always wearing a fig leaf…) I figure some blue nosed jackass took a look at my site and saw that it was full of unashamedly gay content and complained to the filtering software company.
The blocking message provides a link to where you can complain if you think you’re being blocked unfairly, and I give it some thought. I’m not entirely happy about being accused of being a pornographer. But on the other hand, I’m certain this isn’t about any suggestive content in my cartoons, so much as the political content of the blog, and perhaps the political cartoons. I’m gay, and I’m fine with that, and as far as some people are concerned, that makes me X-rated. Which makes this blocking notice I’m looking at a political statement.
Jon helpfully tells me that there are rating services I can subscribe to which will rate my website and help keep it unblocked, and I instantly have images of something like the old Comics Code Authority plastered on the top of my cartoons and I hate it. No. No. That is not going to happen. The only rating my cartoons, or anything else on my web site that I publish will ever have stamped on them, is the only one that matters: My name.
I may still request a little clarification from the filtering company that Panera Bread is using. In the meantime, if you have trouble accessing my website from some public place send me an email and I’ll tell you a few ways to get past it. Jon and I eventually brought my website up at Panera Bread’s anyway. And in the context of Kultar Kampf, being censored is more like a badge of honor then a stain on your reputation.
Yesterday, on the way to our weekly happy hour gathering, I tell Joe about having my web site censored for pornographic content. He congratulates me.
"The Internet treats censorship as damage, and it routes around it."
-John Gilmore
[Edited a Tad…] In the comments Jon tells me it was Panera Bread not Cosi as I’d originally said…
Jim, one of the founders of the political blogosphere, started the Rittenhouse Review a week or two before Duncan Black started Eschaton.
He was my fairy blogfather. He showed me how to install a sitemeter, he gave me tips for building readership, and advised me to “pick a fight with a blogger who’s much better known – you can’t believe how well it works.” (I never took his advice, though.) He even paid to have the ugly banner ad removed from the top of my first site.
More than that, Jim was extraordinarily generous. A master networker, he insisted on introducing all of his friends to each other and they, in turn, became friends. “See?” he’d say. “I told you you’d hit it off.” In turn, I introduced him to the sweet potato fries and the chocolate bread pudding at Silk City.
Rittenhouse Review was one of the first progressive blogs I started reading regularly. Through his blog Jim introduced me to many others in the progressive blog sphere who I now regard as daily necessities. Atrios, and Fred Clark’s Slacktivist to name two. Jim was kind enough to put my little blog on his blogroll one day, and he emailed me some questions about why I was blogging, and would I mind being put on his blogger mailing list. I was just thrilled to have the attention. I quickly began to thoroughly enjoy Jim’s online company. Jim was a really good hearted man, and he had a curious, restless, hungry mind. His blog posts, which ranged far and wide across any topic that interested him only gave you a hint of it. I remember one day Jim emailed me out of the blue and asked if I could take some photos of a couple specific Christian Scientist temples in the Washington Baltimore area. He said he was doing research for a book on their architectural styles. Susie notes in her blog post…
Jim spoke God knows how many languages. I once met him for lunch when he walked in wearing a Walkman. This intrigued me, because he never, ever listened to popular music. “What are you listening to?” I said, pulling at the headphones.
“I’m teaching myself Dutch,” he said, almost apologetically.
Then one day, just as Susie mentions in the post above, Jim invited me to Philadelphia to meet his other blogger friends. That was when I got to meet Duncan Black (Atrios) and Fred Clark, and many other really nice folks…and of course Jim himself. It was a treat. You hear it over and over again how some people are much quieter and more soft spoken in person then they are online. That was true to a degree with Jim, but also he was if anything, more intense in person then you saw on his blog. You really saw that restless curiosity about…well…everything…when you met him in person. It was wonderful for an evening, just to behold it.
So we’ve lost another good person in the blog world this summer and I am heartbroken. I hadn’t heard from Jim in ages and I just assumed he’d lost interest in blogging because that hungry mind of his had wandered elsewhere. I had no idea he was sick. I should have pinged him a time or two this past year and I didn’t, and now I can’t.
The Bush Administration crack down a couple years ago on broadcast indecency was usually taken to be a bone tossed at it’s fundamentalist base.
That’s not a reference to crack cocaine you drooling morons! You’ll never see me advocating the use of that poison here. And why the hell (whoops…I said it again…dang…) is the word "gay" something impressionable kids shouldn’t be exposed to? I’m a gay man. Right? Okay…fine. Gay. Gay. Gay. Gay. Now I have 32 instances of the word to count against my poor blog. Oh…and five for crack. Uh…six. Aw…fuck it . Whoops.
But you know what…this is exactly the kind of jackass way the MPAA rates movies anyway. So I guess you won’t be seeing ads for The Story So Far in your local newspaper’s movieguide anytime soon…
Momentarily abandoned by the two people at the party that I know well, I am engaged in conversation by a yellow Crocs-wearing, pop-collared, fauxhawkedangertwink:
Angertwink: So, Rob said you are a writer?
JMG: Depends on your definition. I have a blog.
AT: A what? A blog? Wait, is that on the internet?
JMG: What, you seriously don’t know about blogs?
AT: Um, I don’t know, I guess I do. Like, name one.
JMG: Well, I guess one of the most famous ones is Andrew Sullivan’s…
AT: Andrew…. who? Oh, right! That guy who killed Gianni Versace!
…and I have to open a Google Image page and first I Google "Crocs clothing" because I figure it’s an article of clothing he’s talking about.
Oh Sweet Jesus…
No! No! No!Please dear God keep those goddamned things off of cute guys! Next I have to Google "faux hawked" Ugh. Those… Then I Google "popped collar" Meh… Then I Google "angertwink" and I’m back at Joe. My. God…
Angertwink (noun):
A young urban gay male who goes through his life very angry because:
1) The rest of the gay world does not recognize his incredible hotness.
2) The rest of the gay world is not incredibly hot, like he is.
Identifying characteristics: Angertwinks can often be spotted wearing fauxhawks, popped collars, and expressions of disgust.
Angertwink was coined by my friend Dagon, on his blog At The Mountains Of Madness. (Example: here). After a few beers last night, I told him that he had to get this word into UrbanDictionary.com or Wikipedia or something,
I dunno… How angry can you be when you’re wearing goddamned Yellow Crocs?
This is one of his essays, reposted in the comments section on Kos. Here he is on what looks like a riff about the meaning of liberalism, but it’s really about swinging back when the gutter takes a swing at you. Steve had no patients for liberals and democrats who wouldn’t stand up proudly for themselves and their political and moral values, and who by default, allowed the right wing smears against their party and its history to go unchallenged in the name of not sinking down to their level. Steve understood that you just can’t allow a single solitary right wing lie to go unchallenged because before you know it, that lie will take on a life of its own. As many have.
This is so typical of him, and why he will be much missed.
You know, I’ve studied history, I’ve read about America and you know something, if it weren’t for liberals, we’d be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren’t fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.
What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn’t given us anything we didn’t have and it wants to take away our freedoms.
The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man’s path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?
Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. "Globalism" which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.
For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn’t. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn’t enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.
Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.
Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.
It’s time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.
It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.
Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America’s defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.
It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?
Why are so many liberal bloggers up in arms about Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine being picked to give the Democrat’s reply to Bush’s State of the Union? There’s been fury in the blogosphere about everything from Kaine’s looks, style, obscurity, his open talk about his faith and his inexperience in national security.
Liberal writer Ezra Klein (no Brad Pitt, last time I checked him out) vented that Kaine is "a squat, squinty, pug-nosed fellow." Even the invariably smart and strategic Arianna (Huffington) weighed in: "What the hell are they thinking?" She accused Democrats of picking "someone whose only claim to fame is that he carried a red state" when they need to make the case that "the GOP is not the party that can best keep us safe."
But, let’s get real here.
1. It doesn’t really matter who gives the reply, since no one listens and it’s an impossible task.
2. This is slightly less important than whether House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi chooses to wear blue or red to listen to the speech.
…………….
4. And, hell, Kaine is pretty liberal for a Virginian. During the campaign, he was derided relentlessly by the GOP, in an expensive and vicious campaign, as "the most liberal candidate who’s ever run for governor in the Commonwealth of Virginia’s history." Kaine is a guy who made a name for himself working with the American Civil Liberties Union, who connected his faith to his politics in authentic ways (he was a thoughtful opponent of the death penalty), who was an honest and forthright advocate of government’s affirmative role–supporting moves to increase taxes to fund education, transportation and environmental programs…………………..
For liberal bloggers who want to get exercised about something really important: Where are the Democrats or liberals talking about Ford laying off some 30,000 workers, the end of middle class benefits for working Americans, IBM’s gutting of pension security, and the collapse of American manufacturing?
…………………….
If you want to know why Dems don’t win elections, it won’t be because Kaine is talking this Tuesday night. It’s because the mainstream leadership of the Democratic party doesn’t think, feel, viscerally respond to the increasing insecurities of working americans.
I guess Katrina doesn’t read any labor blogs, oddly enough she should, but that’s a pig fight for another day.
First, let’s start with her cheap shot at Ezra Klein. He wasn’t talking about the man’s stature for no reason. It’s because it matters. And the point of having Jack Murtha speak was to discuss the war and Bush’s lies with impecable credibility. We don’t need any fucking lectures on Tim Kaine’s strengths and weaknesses. We’re the ones who backed his campaign. And frankly, we were more concerned with ginning up support for a filibuster than who refuted Bush at the SOTU. A couple of opinions is not a controversy. Less people posted on this than a discussion on mac and cheese I had on this site a few weeks ago.
I mean, I wouldn’t call Marc Cooper a fat piece of shit to describe him, beacuse that’s cheap, mean and irrelevant, just like that was a cheap and unfair shot about Klein, who unlike some heiresses with a taste for short skirts and leather jackets, didn’t have his blog handed to him. It’s an unfair use of power and position to smack someone down for no good reason. But he has friends and friends of friends who won’t let that little slam go unremarked.
When Jonah Goldberg attacked her over the hurricane, many in the blogosphere ripped him a new asshole for what he did. It was cheap and unfair and we stuck up for her. This is our repayment.
Ever wonder why liberals get their ass kicked? Because they don’t take things seriously like responding to the State of the Union. It may not matter to her and the cocktail party circuit, but it matters to millions of people on TV to hear they’ve been told bullshit by the President. If she thinks it’s on par with Nancy Pelosi’s clothing choices, well………
"Pretty liberal for a Virginian". Wow, not condescending at all. That’s pretty much like saying "he speaks well for a black man". And she’s giving lectures on what Democrats miss? Well, fuck me, she just sneered at the fairly large number of liberal democrats in Virginia (UVA, what’s that?) like they were trained monkeys or something. Just because he has an accent doesn’t mean he’s a racist or a conservative. There are liberals in every part of the country, but not to the Nation.
She’s has the gall to lecture us on workers rights? I mean, I could swing a dead cat around the Nation’s offices before hitting a black person. Did you ever notice this city was 57 percent minority? What, not enough blacks or hispanics at NYU or City College to offer internships to? Or only when you know the parents do the offers come through. It’s easy to talk about 30,0o0 Ford employees you’ll never meet.
But don’t you think something is just fucked up when you look around your offices and it looks as white as a country club? You want to talk about visceral? Let’s talk about your hiring practices. You want to talk about Democrats and liberals, yet your own publication reflects an increasingly narrow and unrepresentative slice of liberal ideology, one which oddly enough, people are rejecting to read blogs for. Who do you speak for? Not the majority of New Yorkers or urban america, except through a filter of uper middle class entitlement and distant concern.
So I’m in no mood to take lectures from people who have no clue about what Democrats or bloggers even do. And is frankly so spineless as to keep the aformentioned Marc Cooper on the masthead, after he shit on the staff of the Nation to cozy up to his reactionary buddies at Pajamas Media. If the Nation was run by some of the tough minded people who run blogs, his ass would have been bouncing down the street.
We’ve lost a fighter. Steve Gilliard was someone I admired immensely and read daily, and when he fell ill this time, and I read about the difficulty he was having in the hospital, I was afraid it would come to this. I am going to miss his passionate, angry, righteous voice more then I want to think about right now.
He began as a frequent commenter on Daily Kos…
When reporters ask me when I first started thinking Daily Kos would become something more important, I tell them about the Dean campaign, or about the traffic explosion during the run-up and start of the Iraq War.
But that’s pretty much bullshit. Because the reality is much more mundane, much less sexy —
It was the arrival on the site’s comment boards of two people — Meteor Blades and Steve Gilliard.
They were a real revelation to me — I couldn’t believe that people like them, so brilliant, so insightful, so talented, would spend time at my little corner of the world. They inspired me to keep writing, keep building this place. Because if nothing else, I needed to make sure they had a platform upon which to speak.
So they ended up being two of the first contributing editors on Daily Kos. Steve, in fact, was the first person I ever approached with the "guest blogger" offer. And he didn’t waste time getting started, drawing on history of the region and the British occupation of Iraq in the late 1910s to set the stage for what the US would soon face in Iraq. He was frighteningly prescient on Iraq, and it wasn’t the only topic he would consistently nail. He was a credit to the progressive blogosphere.
Steve was a big personality, and it was clear he needed his own stage. And he got it with the News Blog, which he soon built into a full-time gig, still a rarity among bloggers. It was one of three sites I religiously checked more than three times a day.
If you knew Steve only from his blog, you’d think he was a pit bull. He was blunt, loud, aggressive, unafraid, and took no prisoners.
But you’d meet him in life, and he was the exact opposite. He was soft-spoken, shy, modest, calm, friendly, and — this was the most surprising to me — gentle.
I never would’ve gotten that from his writings. But that’s what he was.
I’d known Steve five years — just about my entire blogging existence. I don’t know of a blogging life without him. He has been a friend, a confidant, a sounding board, a reality check, a loyal ally, a mentor. He was family.
And while that all came to an end Saturday morning, I’m still not ready to let it go.
We were blessed to have Steve as long we did. But I’m selfish. I wanted much, much more.
I went a couple of rounds with Steve a few years back, mostly ribbing during one of the earlier rounds of blogger wars (the "pie fight" drama). More often than not though, over the last two years, we agreed on quite a bit, including our disdain for the religious right and the outlandish transparent efforts by the GOP to promote the candidacies of sell-out, fundie kissing house negroes like Ken Blackwell as proof of the party’s "outreach" to the black community.
We corresponded every once in a while, mostly of the "can you believe this sh*t?" nature regarding the above. Steve enthusiastically came to my defense back in February when The Peter and CWA launched their email disinformation campaign to discredit me (and attempt jeopardize my day job) by calling me "anti-Christian." Steve emailed and said:
You need to call these people out as racists and homophobes.
They think you’re going to care what they think. Tell them that you don’t need a bunch of racists lecturing you on the black church or anything else. That their rampant homophobia also disqualifies them. And then add in that they have no respect for lesbians or blacks anyway, besides hiring tokens.
As far as anti-Christian, unless you grew up in a far different family than mine, you know about the church and the one you grew up in was not filled with hateful screeds like this.
Steve was a fighter. He knew that when the gutter takes a swing at you, you have to swing back, and hard and keep on swinging until they crawl back to wherever they came from. None of this, faux civility crap when it came to dealing with the gutter. Steve told it like it was, said it like it needed to be said, and never, Never conceded so much as an inch of the moral high ground to posturing republican thugs. He knew his history…God how he knew his history…and he could relate the past to the present with breathtaking precision and insight. Kos is right about how prescient he was on Iraq. He saw with clarity how the imperialist impulse, and that relentless blindness to the lives and humanity of non-westerners, the arrogance and conceit of white superiority, still lives on and moves the hard right. He understood it. He understood how it informs the history we are living today. And he never shrank from calling it for what it was, just as he never thought twice about calling out democratic party sell-outs, or those black leaders and ministers who think they can make a deal with the right for their own personal glory. He always called it for what it was, no matter how impolitic.
We need more like him nowadays, not less. And now he’s gone. Damn. Damn!
You were an honest, righteous, decent voice. You fought the good fight. You’re going to be missed. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to bear taking your link down.
I found this on another gay guy’s blog I read from time to time and gave it a try. At first glance it looked like a more visually interesting then usual online quiz, but behind it is yet another new social networking site, Imagini. It’s marked “beta” on their home page logo so I assume it’s still a work in progress. Ever since MySpace became this huge cultural phenomina a gaggle of other self described “social networking sites” have popped up vying for a piece of the pie, or to be the next big thing. But this one lets you describe yourself in a very eye catching way…
Alas, I can’t figure out how to format its damn embedding code in a way that let’s me put it in the center of the page like I can a YouTube player.
You start out by answering a series of questions about yourself, Visually. This appealed instantly to the graphic art geek in me. The personality profile it generated for me seemed to have me pretty well pegged in a few ways, and not in a few others, but over all it resonated with me and most of these little quiz things don’t.
I’m on MySpace. I’ve been referred to Friendster. I’ve added profiles to blogger and Live Journal so I could leave comments on friends’ blogs there. But as I’m perfectly capable of making my own web space (this one) I’m unlikely to ever be more then a passer-by on any social networking site, no matter how many features it offers. I think that’s what most folks on those sites are. I have my own domain. It’s like my little house on the net here. I can make it whatever I want. Everyone should have their own home out here. But of course not everyone has the skill set or the time to build their own, which is where sites like blogger and Live Journal can help. What’s nice about MySpace, what made it grow as hugely as it did in my opinion, is that it was structured in a way that Does encourage you socialize with the others more then other like sites did. I need that too. The encouragement that is.
So I’m pretty much a regular on MySpace too. I don’t have enough time in a day to be a regular in too many social sites. But Imagini Looks interesting. Alas, it rates me a zero percent match for the gay guy whose blog I found this on (shy little dickens wouldn’t even put a name to his Imagini profile…he’s signed in as “Anonymous”). Ah well. I actually kinda figured after reading his blogger blog for a couple years now that we aren’t exactly compatible types. I just read him ‘cuz he’s so damn cute.
Some stuff I was meaning to post about this weekend but didn’t have the time…
Wanna See Something Really Scary…?
Jesus Plus Nothing: The Political Right at Bible Study, is an article that was originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 2003. But it’s still worth a read, if you don’t mind getting a peek into the hidden world and machinations of the secretive group of believers who refer to themselves as "the Family"…the folks who have been running the "National Prayer Breakfast" since 1953.
Ivanwald, which sits at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in Arlington, Virginia, is known only to its residents and to the members and friends of the organization that sponsors it, a group of believers who refer to themselves as “the Family.” The Family is, in its own words, an “invisible” association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men. Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as “members,” as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries. The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.
The organization has operated under many guises, some active, some defunct: National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, the National Leadership Council, Fellowship House, the Fellowship Foundation, the National Fellowship Council, the International Foundation. These groups are intended to draw attention away from the Family, and to prevent it from becoming, in the words of one of the Family’s leaders, “a target for misunderstanding.” [1] The Family’s only publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February in Washington, D.C. Each year 3,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations, pay $425 each to attend. Steadfastly ecumenical, too bland most years to merit much press, the breakfast is regarded by the Family as merely a tool in a larger purpose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more frequent prayer meetings, where they can “meet Jesus man to man.”
In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy. In 1978 it secretly helped the Carter Administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, and more recently, in 2001, it brought together the warring leaders of Congo and Rwanda for a clandestine meeting, leading to the two sides’ eventual peace accord last July. Such benign acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa’s postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand “Communists” killed marks him as one of the century’s most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise. “We work with power where we can,” the Family’s leader, Doug Coe, says, “build new power where we can’t.”
At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, George H.W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what he described as “quiet diplomacy, I wouldn’t say secret diplomacy,” as an “ambassador of faith.” Coe has visited nearly every world capital, often with congressmen at his side, “making friends” and inviting them back to the Family’s unofficial headquarters, a mansion (just down the road from Ivanwald) that the Family bought in 1978 with $1.5 million donated by, among others, Tom Phillips, then the C.E.O. of arms manufacturer Raytheon, and Ken Olsen, the founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation. A waterfall has been carved into the mansion’s broad lawn, from which a bronze bald eagle watches over the Potomac River. The mansion is white and pillared and surrounded by magnolias, and by red trees that do not so much tower above it as whisper. The mansion is named for these trees; it is called The Cedars, and Family members speak of it as a person. “The Cedars has a heart for the poor,” they like to say. By “poor” they mean not the thousands of literal poor living barely a mile away but rather the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom: the senators, generals, and prime ministers who coast to the end of Twenty-fourth Street in Arlington in black limousines and town cars and hulking S.U.V.’s to meet one another, to meet Jesus, to pay homage to the god of The Cedars.
There they forge “relationships” beyond the din of vox populi (the Family’s leaders consider democracy a manifestation of ungodly pride) and “throw away religion” in favor of the truths of the Family. Declaring God’s covenant with the Jews broken, the group’s core members call themselves “the new chosen.”
The Family’s leaders consider democracy a manifestation of ungodly pride… Somebody might want to start asking all the politicians that hang around them and big business leaders who give them money why they’re supporting an anti-democratic cult.
Mr. Sheldon, your nose is growing… Good As You catches Mr. Family Values, Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, in a great big fib. Once again we see a righteous man of God counting on the fact that the pews are unlikely to fact check him.
For the past two decades political correctness has been derided as a surrender to thin-skinned, humorless, uptight oversensitive sissies. Well, you anti-politically correct people have won the battle, and we’re all now feasting on the spoils of your victory. During the last few months alone we’ve had a few comedians spout racism, a basketball coach put forth anti-Semitism and several high-profile spoutings of anti-gay epithets.
And you thought e pluribus unum was this country’s motto…
Finally…a little comic relief from, where else, The Daily Show. You have to figure it can’t be easy for Nancy Grace these days, seeing a fellow out of control prosecutor going down hard like that…
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