They say men don’t change, they reveal themselves. I suppose that’s possibly true of the man to himself. There are things within us we will never get over. For some of us, it’s a set of prejudices. For others, it’s matters of the heart. I am (I realize this) a sentimentalist. Once upon a time I thought it was just a little thing about me. But no…it’s not just a little thing. I have to be careful.
I’m going through photos of friends from back in the day for posting in a Facebook album. And I am looking at one of a friend I haven’t spoken to in a long time. In it, he is smiling at something just off camera. It is a perfectly happy, carefree smile. The smile I used to see more of, once upon a time. It puts me into a dangerous state. I am remembering how much I liked him. I am remembering how well we got along together. Left shoe-right shoe. Peas in a pod. One starts the sentence, the other completes it. Just about as close as two guys can be and not be lovers.
I stopped talking to him when he took that detour into Rush Limbaugh land. I was being more open about my sexual orientation, getting damn tired of always having to tread lightly around the prejudices of the people around me, the prejudices we’d all had drilled into us ever since we were kids. I was in my 40s, and beginning to realize I wasn’t going to have a life completely free of the closet, if I didn’t start living one now. My friends had enough time by then to get over it. But the more open I was, the more static I got from this particular one.
So one day, I just gave up and stopped speaking to him. He would call from time to time, and I would not answer. Just leave me alone…
He is in very poor health these days. His situation is not good. He lives on disability, and his knack for trading. Cigarettes are slowly killing him. The last time I saw him, he was practically a skeleton of his former self. And I’m looking at this photograph, and his smile, and I’m wondering now what kind of asshole I’ve been all this time.
He’s your friend…he’s down on his luck…he may be dying…and you’re being a jerk Bruce Garrett…
So I call and hear his voice for the first time in a long while, and with that image of him from back in the 70s in mind I am almost in tears. Hey guy…how are you these days…everything okay…? And we chat for a while, and…
…and it doesn’t take long for him to remind me why I stopped speaking to him.
He: (talking about the lady he’s been seeing…his on again off again girlfriend. He’s complaining about her sudden mood swings. One moment its all good, the next its Stressville…)
Me: I know the feeling. I was down in Florida a couple weeks ago, and got a chance to see my high school crush for a while. He’s got a really nice place down there and he invited me…
He: (changing the subject) Did I tell you about the Smith & Wesson Airweight I got…
Ah yes… I get to hear about your love life but don’t I dare tell you about mine. And it gets better…
Me: So you have a computer again? You doing anything besides the eBay thing? Facebook?
He: Yeah I’m on Facebook…
Me: (remembering) Oh…right…
He: Yeah, and I defriended you because I didn’t want all that gay stuff showing up on my page. I didn’t want my other friends seeing it. You can be offended now for a couple minutes and then get over it…
Me: Ah…right. You’re still a little fuzzy about how all this stuff works aren’t you? Your friends see your wall, not your news page. The news page shows you stuff your friends are doing. Their notes and links and status messages don’t all show up on your wall unless you choose to share them. The news page you see when you sign in isn’t your wall.
He: (changing the subject) I don’t do eBay anymore. I am on Gun Traders now…
…and so on. Of course the problem wasn’t your friends might see All That Gay Stuff on your page, but that you kept seeing it. That was always the problem. If I have to get over anything I suppose it’s you guy. You will never get over my being gay will you? Never. Won’t happen.
Right. I have to keep that old photograph of you in its context whenever I look at it. That was a different time. A different universe practically. We were so close back then. Best friends practically. But you took a detour into Rush Limbaugh land and we can’t talk anymore. I suppose we’re not the only friends who have been separated by the culture war. But…really…it wasn’t Rush who got between us, it was your cheapshit prejudices. You want to think you like me as a friend, but you don’t like Me. It was that name on the closet door you made a friend of. There is nothing behind that door anymore.
Not Quite All The Way To Alcoholicville Apparently…
This last trip to Disney World found me hitting the Grand Mariner Orange Slushie stand in Epcot France and the Frozen Margarita stand in Epcot Mexico the moment I entered the park. The stresses of my life at this stage of it are making it increasingly hard to just…relax…and enjoy myself without some form of self-medication. It worries me. But the worry is itself becoming more and more vague. I’m starting not to care about my health anymore.
Anyway…I saw this graph which perked me up a tad…
My college experiences were So Different from most of the other kids… Who the hell even thinks they can down 10 drinks in a sitting, let alone that it would take that much for them to start puking their guts out? Anyway, the first thing I noticed about the graph is it Starts at five drinks.
So…I’m still cool. Five drinks and I am, not kidding, on the floor. If my end point is where everyone else is just getting started then I’m not doing so bad.
So I went to Key West a few weeks ago, for a little vacation with some friends. I love Key West. I absolutely love the climate (at least the winter climate…I hear the summer swelter is a bit much…). Even more, I love its laid back live and let live attitude. It’s a place where people go, creative people, intelligent people, non-conformists, go to live lives away from the mainland mainstream. The t-shirts on sale everywhere there celebrate sex, drinking, cigars, smuggling, toking, Harleys, growing old and not giving a damn, being poor and not giving a damn, drinking, drinking, and sex. Levittown it ain’t. It’s San Francisco and New Orleans but more laid back. It’s Taos but instead of mountains it’s surrounded by a beautiful turquoise tropical sea and never gets below freezing.
The old town part of the island shelters dozens of historical landmarks and structures with history going back to the first Americans, embracing pirates, salvagers, smugglers, shipwrecked settlers, writers, artists, actors and presidents. Hemingway, Truman, Hunter S. Thompson, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost and Thomas Edison called it home at one point or another. The locals call themselves Conchs and call their island home a nice little drinking place with a tourist problem.
In 1982 the U.S. Border Patrol put up a roadblock between Miami and Key West, and vehicles were searched for narcotics and illegals. The roadblock put a huge dent in tourism. The city council complained to the Feds and got nowhere. So Key West declared itself The Conch Republic, seceded from the Union, declared war on the United States (by way of the mayor breaking a loaf of stale Cuban bread over the head of someone dressed in a military uniform…), then immediately surrendered and asked for a billion dollars in foreign aid and war relief.
Well they didn’t get their billion, but the roadblock came down.
I love Key West. Ever since my first visit, I’ve thought often about moving there someday. I love its laid back, away from the mainland mainstream attitude. And it is a party town, at least around Duval Street. You practically can’t spit in any direction without hitting a bar, at least one of which, The Garden of Eden, is clothing optional. There are strip clubs, gay and straight and the dancers will walk over to customers to negotiate commerce, barely legal and possibly otherwise as well. A blind eye is turned to a lot of things as long as no one causes any trouble. For all its open sexuality and drinking, there is actually very little rowdiness.
You have to love a place where all this can be going on and yet it stays laid back about it all. I could love to live in a place like that. The ironic thing is, this trip to Key West really emphasized it for me that I am not that.
I have this love/hate relationship with my Baptist upbringing. Sometimes I feel like it made me grow up entirely too inhibited. Sometimes I am deeply grateful for it. There are values, moral values, I still hold to, and find ever more vital as I grow older, and see more and more of what a world without them looks like. Honesty. Prudence in ones financial matters. Earning your keep, and the trust of others. A regard for social justice, tempered by a little humility every now and then, when the urge to thump your pulpit strikes. But for every positive, I can find a negative.
I was never allowed to think of myself as beautiful or desirable. That was vanity and it was a deadly sin. Once when I was in my middle teens, mom, grandma, and a few other family members were at the beach. I had decided to wear the new swim suit I’d bought, which I knew might raise some eyebrows but I thought I’d dare it. It wasn’t terribly sexy by today’s standards, but it was colorful and showed my body off at a time when I definitely had one to show. I strolled out onto the beach with it feeling beautiful for one of the rare times in my life, and just loud enough for me to hear some of the folks made a few off color cracks about it…precisely aimed to embarrass the hell out of me. I must have blushed fifty shades of red and went back to the hotel. I never wore it again.
I’ve had trouble my entire life with being sexually inhibited, and it isn’t just the beating my psyche took being a gay adolescent. But there is inhibited, and there is reserved and it’s taken me the better part of adulthood to discover that my sexual reticence isn’t all the result of having the bible beaten over my head all throughout my childhood. It’s been like carving out a hunk of marble to find the shape within that is really me, and not the stone cast around me from an early age. I think I’m about down to it now, and swear I’d have thought the inner uninhibited me was a tad more footloose and fancy free then this. But…no.
My friends stayed in “Big Ruby’s”…a gay “clothing optional” bed and breakfast. I stayed at the Coco Palm, just around the corner. Let me tell you about that. Two of the guys I went down with are a couple. The other is a party kind of guy, and not to put too fine a point on it, he went down there for the sex. So this guy makes some arrangements for rooms at Big Ruby’s and the night before, he sends me an email asking if I wanted to share a room with him. I had a pretty good idea what he was going to be getting into down there and I didn’t want to be sharing a room with him if he was going to be bringing guys back to it. So I made a polite excuse…told him I’m an “only child” who always had his own room and I like my privacy…blah, blah, blah… The next day I learn he’d made arrangements for himself and my two friends at Big Ruby’s, but not me. So I guess “yes” was the right answer. But…NO.
In retrospect I’m glad I didn’t stay there. My two friends got themselves a nice apartment room with a kitchen that we all used as a headquarters. We used the kitchen for making lunch and sometimes dinner too, and we all relaxed around the pool during Big Ruby’s happy hour. Since I wasn’t a guest there I couldn’t drink their booze, but the landlord was fine with my bringing my own liquor and sharing with the others. And as I walked in and out of Big Ruby’s, I got an eyeful of the stuff going on there and sometimes it was embarrassing. They had a hot tub… Walking past it was a real challenge. Part of me would be deeply embarrassed while that damn logical/analytical part of my brain was absolutely fascinated, full of questions. Don’t they have lovers…???
I watched several naked guys rise from the hot tub at full attention and I was not only unaroused, but actually turned off by the whole thing, and I swear the thought crossed my mind right at that moment that maybe I’m not gay after all. Later I tried to think of a situation where I would be aroused. Immediately one came to mind, but it involved not a group of guys but one…one special one…just him and me in the tub all by ourselves. The plus side of having the high intensity imagination I do is I can make myself all hot and bothered pretty easily.
Yeah, I’m gay all right. Just not the kind of gay guy who goes for casual hooking up in the hot tub with a bunch of strangers regardless of how gorgeous they are. While reading John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley I came across this saying: Cold Feet, Warm Heart. At the age I read it I kinda thought I knew what it meant, but it took years of growing up and passing through adolescence to really understand it. Yeah. That’s me. Cold feet, warm heart.
So I wandered for a time amongst the party crowd at Key West, enjoying myself very much, but coming to an understanding, finally, that I am not that. I am a quiet little romantic, who feels suffocated wherever people have to stifle themselves in order to survive. I’m a shy little homebody looking for his soulmate, who despises people who impose particular gender and sexual roles on others. I’m a gay man who understands intimately well how conformity kills the soul. I’ve watched it happen. I will not willingly live in that world. Even if I could pass for normal in that environment…I couldn’t. But I am not that.
Wherein The Children Of Rand And The Children Of Marx Commiserate With One Another And Then Have A Round Of Drinks…
Smokin’ hot essay in this month’s GQ by John Ritter on Ayn Rand’s influence on college students, bankers, financiers, chairmen of the Federal Reserve, and other people who need to have their certainties smacked out of them from time to time for the good of the rest of us. I know, because I used to be one of them…
A weirdly specific thing happens with the books of Ayn Rand. It’s not just the what of the books, but when a reader discovers them—almost always during the first or second year of college. Rand grabs a reader at a time of maximum vulnerability and malleability, when he’s getting his first accurate sense of how he measures up in the world in terms of intellect and talent. The longing to regard oneself as misunderstood and underrated can be powerful; the temptation to project oneself as such, irresistible…
Sort of. Not everyone likes thinking of themselves as misunderstood. I sure didn’t. But I never blamed being taken for a weird little geek on being misunderstood because I knew I was one. Being raised in a Baptist household the first person you always blame for just about everything, let alone not fitting in, is yourself.
It was after leaving my church and coming out to myself as gay that I first read Rand. But in retrospect, clearly, all those days spent in church listening to fire and brimstone pulpit thumping had left their mark on me. I craved moral certainty, and admired the firebrand moralist who spoke to those certainties. If I have a weakness to this day that’s it. But at 20 the bible had long since lost its power as a moral instrument. It was still interesting in its echo from a distant time kinda way, but no longer authoritative. I wandered aimlessly in a kind of existential stupor, unwilling to rest my moral values on religious absolutes that I knew perfectly well were nothing more then the bar stool prejudices of various pulpit thumpers, but unable to find another moral compass to guide my way. Reason and morality it seemed, were two different things.
Two books shook me out of my moral fog then, almost one after the other. In retrospect, both were terribly flawed teachers. And yet they left me with concepts I still value to this day. The first was Robert Audrey’s African Genesis. I found a tattered copy of it in a corner of a warehouse I once worked in, wrinkled and discarded, and picking it up and reading the first page of it…
Not in innocence, and not in Asia was mankind born…
…I had to take the thing home. I absolutely devoured it. And from Audry I gleaned the idea that the forces that move within our consciousness actually are understandable and manageable…but only if we seriously study our evolutionary past. To construct workable human societies, and moral codes that actually and really benefit us, we need to undertake an almost brutal, unromantic, understanding of ourselves and that means looking also to the past which brought us forth. Not to do so would be akin to trying to build a bridge with no understanding of the nature of the materials you’re constructing it from…
We are not so unique as we would like to believe. And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.
Yes. Yes. And Yes. I still passionately believe this is true. Let it be said that a lot of naturalists and anthropologists really hate Audrey for his overwrought image of humans as killer apes. But you can discard that part of it…our understanding of the human ancestors is much improved since he wrote that book…and still respect the basic idea. We are, each of us, in body and consciousness, living histories of millions of years of life on earth. To make a better life for ourselves in the here and now, we need to understand that history.
The second book was Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. As John Ritter writes…
The days during which that 19-year-old has Rand’s worldview vectored into his cerebral cortex are feverish and sleepless. Days of beautiful affliction during which the intransigence of others—roommates, a coed the patient has been hitting on, professors, parents, everyone—are shown to be the product of their shortcomings, their idiocy and sublimated envy of the patient’s intelligence and talent… One day you’ve got a bright young kid dutifully connecting the dots of his liberal-arts education; the next, he’s got Roark and Galt in the marrow and has become…an insufferable asshole.
Well…kind of. I never thought of my friends as idiots. But I suspect I did turn into a bit of a jerk because that’s what happens to people when they become True Believers. Suddenly everything made sense! The world was powered by the rational human intellect! Everything that denied the mind was anti-life! Capitalism wasn’t merely the most productive economic system ever invented, it was the only Moral one! To take possession of your own life and live it for the good of your Self was the highest virtue! Here was an ideology that appealed to my inner geek and my inner pulpit thumper both. I am certain there was a period in my life when I couldn’t speak two words without going off about Randian ideology. It’s amazing I still have friends from that period.
People wonder how it is that so many gays become Randians since Rand herself was a vitriolic homophobe. But Rand’s morality of sex, that enjoying sex for its own sake was not only moral, but was morally validated by a couple’s mutual pleasure in each other’s bodies, is very appealing to a people who are taught to feel ashamed of any hint of sexual desire in themselves the moment puberty hits them. I saw Rand’s morality as a reasoned and high minded rejection of the notion of original sin drilled into me all throughout my Baptist childhood, that our bodies, that our feelings of sexual desire, were evidence of humanity’s fallen state. And it seemed to validate any sexual relationship, gay or straight, that sprang from mutual appreciation of the best within each other, body and soul. Rand declared that sexual joy for its own sake, taken between two people who wholeheartedly and completely desire each other was a righteous thing. And a lot of gay people, myself included, said ‘Amen!’
But therein, for me at least, lay the seeds of discontent as well. Rand taught that human emotions were the unconscious sum of the workings of our rational mind. This led her to view homosexuality as the result of bad thinking…faulty premises as she liked to put everything that didn’t fit into her philosophy. It led her acolyte and lover Nathanial Brandon to suggest in one essay that gay men were gay because they’d been subconsciously made afraid of women from being taught to idealize them but not desire them. Huh? As any gay person knows, and especially any gay person who ever tried to psychoanalyze themselves straight, your sexual orientation isn’t something you think yourself into. Or out of. And here was Rand and her "collective" dispensing pop psychology crap about homosexuality that not only gay folk themselves, but actual researchers, had known for decades was claptrap. We don’t think ourselves into our sexual orientations, they just are. But that kind of thinking about human consciousness was anathema to Rand.
How I managed to embrace an ideology that regarded human consciousness as entirely the province of the rational mind after reading and embracing Audrey I cannot explain. But there it was. Eventually the ideas I gleaned from Audrey did come back to me. I think it was while reading a statement of Rand’s that she was neither a supporter nor denier of the theory of evolution. Well of course, because evolution throws a great big monkey wrench into her model of human consciousness which acknowledged only the human capacity for rational thinking. Rand’s human being was every bit the separate creation that Adam was in Genesis. And that is not what a human being is. The moment I read her statement on evolution it got me to thinking about all the other ways I’d had to forgive Rand for making pronouncements about this and that which just seemed…well…stupid.
And that was how I found my way out the door to her church. The one thing I took from her that I still keep close to my heart to this day is the idea that morality must be reason-based. It must withstand the test of truth, conform to the evidence, logically and objectively work to benefit our lives. Oh that Rand herself had held to this idea, when championing her notion that unfettered capitialism is the only moral system.
Unfortunately…for all of us…she didn’t. And neither have her intellectual heirs…
This is because there are boys and girls among us who have never overcome the Randian infection. The Galt speech continues to ring in their ears for years like a maddening tinnitus, turning each of them into what next year’s Physicians’ Desk Reference will (undoubtedly) term an Ayn Rand Asshole (ARA). They constitute a relatively small percentage of Rand readers, these ARAs. But they make their reading count. Thanks to them, the Rand Experience is no longer limited to those who have read the books. It’s metastasized. You, me, all of us, we’re living it. Because it’s the ARA Army of antigovernment-antiregulation puritans who have spent the past three decades gleefully pulling the cooling rods out of the American economy. For a while, it got very big and very hot. Then it popped. And now the rest of us have to spend the next decade scaling the slippery slopes of the huge suppurative crater that was left behind.
Feeling fisted by the Invisible Hand of the Market lo these past fifteen months? Lost a job lately? Or half the value of your 401(k)? Or a home? All three? Been wondering whence the too-long-ascendant political and economic ideas and forces behind Greenspanism, John Thainism, blind Wall Street plunder, bankruptcy, credit-default swaps, Bernie Madoff, and the ensuing Cannibalism in the Streets? Then you, sir, need to give thanks to Ayn Rand Assholes everywhere—as well as the steely loins from which they sprang.
Reading Ritter’s GQ essay gave me a feeling (yes Ayn…a Feeling…) reminiscent of that moment gay folk experience when they discover they’re not the only ones like themselves. Well…if even Alan Greenspan can admit now, while standing there in the center of the wreakage of our ecomony, that perhaps he was wrong about all that deregulation stuff, maybe we’ll see some other big names come out of the closet as ex-Randian. We could be in for lots more fun denunciations of Randian claptrap.
There is a third book I discovered well after Audrey and Rand, which I still hold dear to my heart. Jacob Bronowski’s Science and Human Values. Bronowski clarified for me how knowledge, being a Process of discovery and refinement of models, was also at its core a deeply personal and creative act. He brought me to an understanding I really needed, about how the work of both scientists and artists had the same creative root, thereby bringing my inner techno geek and my inner art geek finally to some degree of peace with one another. But more importantly, he showed me how to get past my need for certainty. There is no perfect God’s eye view to be found, either in the bible or in Atlas Shrugged. Our knowledge exists in an area of imprecision we can never fully eliminate. Call it the Uncertainty Principal or, as Brownoski suggested in The Ascent of Man, the Principal of Tolerance if you like, but there is no God’s eye view. Quantum physics has proven that literally. But that does not mean we can never really know anything. It means we have to always bear in mind that area of uncertianty always tied up in our understandings, and that knowledge is a process of test and refinement, and not a thing we can safely stop questioning. We have to always take care to ask ourselves what we know, and how we know it. Always.
If I had to point to one thing that sums Rand up in her entirety for me it would be this: She wrote in Atlas Shrugged, "I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. FIRE, a dangerous force, tamed at his finger tips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come out from such hours. When a man thinks there is a spot of fire alive in his mind – and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression." Thereby turning cigarettes into a symbol for fans of her and her philosophy. It is a beautiful, eloquant image…the act of thinking, the hand holding fire. In 1974 Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer, quit smoking at that time, and never once for the rest of her life warned her readers about the dangers of cigarettes. When someone gives you, the artist, their love wholeheartedly, you need to love them back.
Mrs. California apparently doesn’t much like them thar gays…
"We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite. And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised."
You were raised to parade around in front of TV cameras in high heels and a tiny little bikini were you? Then later, out comes this…
"It is a very touchy subject and [Perez Hilton] is a homosexual and I see where he was coming from and I see the audience would’ve wanted me to be more politically correct," she added. "But I was raised in a way that you can never compromise your beliefs and your opinions for anything."
and still later…
"I think Mr. Mellish is a traitor to this country because his views are different from the views of the President and others of his kind. Differences of opinion should be tolerated, but not when they’re too different. Then he becomes a subversive mother."
No…wait… I’m confusing Carrie Prejean with a different Mrs. America.
One of our favorite authors in the whole world, the late Fawn Brodie*, did the world a service by helping us all understand a really fascinating time in our country’s history — the wild, wild 1820’s.
…
Specifically, Brodie points out that three national fads had an especially tight grip on the minds of people in western New York in the early 1820s.
The first one is, Where did all these Indians come from? After being practically wiped out in the New England states, they were no longer viewed as a threat, and in fact had just then begun to fall victim to a first wave of cheap romanticism. James Fenimore Cooper, who Mark Twain also mocked scathingly, being a good example. But more importantly, various men of the cloth had begun wondering where these dark skinned natives had come from, and of far greater importance, why the bible made no mention of them. Ah…perhaps they are one of the lost tribes of Israel…
The second fad came about from news reports of the strange system of writing found in ancient Egyptian ruins. The mysterious hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone had been discovered, but it would still be years before someone finally figured out that the hieroglyphs represented vocalizations in the same way that letters of most modern alphabets do. So there was endless fascinated speculation about what the hieroglyphs said. Perhaps they held the key to the mysteries of the ancient world…perhaps they contained profound ancient wisdom long lost to us…
The third fad was a preoccupation with the treasure of the first Spanish explorers. It was known that the Conquistadors had raped the ancient Mayan and Inca civilizations and carted back tons of gold to Spain. But perhaps they had also buried some of it…somewhere…Hey…maybe right in my own back yard!!!
This third archaeological fad was not only amplified by the other two, it provided fertile ground for flim-flam artists. What better way to romanticize the (more exciting) past than to daydream about Indian gold or Spanish doubloons hidden away somewhere on your back forty? Quick to take advantage of that longing was an army of itinerant scammers: a man would arrive at a farm, claim to be a fortune-teller, and swear that he sensed the presence of buried treasure nearby. Some set the hook by showing the gullible a special "seer stone" that the fortune-teller claimed he could use to zero-in on buried gold. For a substantial fee, he’d dig up what was sure to be a whole cache of treasure that would make the farmer very rich. After being paid that fee, naturally, the fortune-teller would then make himself scarce. Farmers in western New York, in particular, seemed to be susceptible to the scam.
Hey…doesn’t this sound like the M.O. of a certain young man named Smith…
Right…
A man named Joseph Smith — who already had a court record for scamming a farmer in the buried-gold scheme — came forward and claimed that an angel had come to him four years earlier with a revelation.
What did the angel ask Smith to do? Are you ready?
— The angel, Smith said, directed him where to dig up a buried treasure, a set of gold tablets. (See: Fad Number Three, above.)
— The tablets were etched in a strange code that looked remarkably like Egyptian hieroglyphs. (See: Fad Number Two.)
— The angel gave Smith a special pair of seer stones that enabled him to read the hieroglyphs as easily as if he were reading English (a really creative combo of Fad Two and Fad Three).
— And what did the tablets describe? Have you guessed? Yes! It was the answer to the ultimate riddle, Fad Numero Uno: The super-cool, heretofore unknown and like, bizarre actual origin of North America’s Indian tribes!
Can I get an L-D-S!
Pray for future generations that no new religion is born in America in this day and age. Ortega avers that all this may be why the Mormon church needs a convenient scapegoat…even more so then other American religious right theocrats…
It’s complicated. But anyway, try to understand that if your entire worldview was based on the completely unreliable ravings of an early 19th-century flim-flam artist with a harem fetish, you too might have a burning inferiority about your belief system, and you might manifest that inferiority by picking on the queers, who make an easy target and scare the bejesus out of your typical Mormon.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…look at all those queers trying to get married!!!
Military engineers defused a giant bomb from World War II that was discovered in East London during construction for the 2012 Summer Olympics, a military spokesman said. The 2,200-pound bomb… started to tick at one point while being defused by a team of Royal Engineers from the British Army. Thousands of bombs fell on East London during World War II.
It strikes me as odd that this necessarily short “World Briefing” item avoids mentioning just who it was that dropped all those bombs on East London during WWII. Those bombs decide on their own to fall all over East London.
Er…what’s your point Dan? You think the American readers of the New York Times might not know where that bomb came from without being told? Hmmm… World War II bomb… East London… Now where the hell could that thing have come from… think… think… think…
Well it probably wasn’t the Japanese. Maybe the Times should have told its readers what that ticking sound signified too because goodness they might think the British had dug up a 2,200 pound Soviet era kitchen timer some poor East German refugee family brought back with them during the cold war, and promptly threw in a ditch when they saw how much better the kitchen timers in the west are. You never know. Maybe there’s a Trabant buried somewhere nearby…
During a visit to Salt Lake City, just blocks from Temple Square at the Gateway Mall, I was aghast to see in the Victoria Secret’s display window a sexually positioned mannequin dressed in skimpy black underwear with garters and black stockings. I credit them for not including whips and chains, but the implication was surely there for the world to see – including small children and teenagers. A nice little Mormon family outing turned into a lesson on immorality with an explanation to my kids why they should wear their temple garments after they are endowed in the temple.
Why should I be exposed to that lewdness unless I choose to walk into the store? At least then I can walk out if I am offended, but please, don’t throw it in my face. It is sad to see that Babylon prospers so well in Zion, and that apparently no one cares enough to protest the perils of pornography. Well, I’m standing up to protect children from exposure to it.
In my childhood, the public was sheltered from inadvertent exposure to pornography by the use of brown protective wrappers on magazines. What a concept! I live in the country and I don’t get out much. Thank goodness.
I have a question. How is it that a moral woman in a nice little Mormon family who grew up protected from pornography by brown paper wrappers and lives in the country and doesn’t get out much knows about including whips and chains with skimpy black underwear, garters and black stockings?
The Intersection Of Batshit Crazy and Fucking Nuts
If you don’t know about the nefarious plan to build a NAFTA Superhighway from Mexico to Canada, stabbing right though the very heartland of America to merge all three countries into a North American Union as a first step toward One World Government…then you obviously haven’t been peering into the right wing cesspool lately. You’re probably better for it…
The American people never supported NAFTA, and they are angry over Bush’s failure to secure the border — but a shotgun marriage between our two nations appears prearranged. Central feature: a ten-lane, 400-yard-wide NAFTA Super Highway from the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, up to and across the U.S. border, all the way to Canada. Within the median strip dividing the north and south car and truck lanes would be rail lines for both passengers and freight traffic, and oil and gas pipelines.
As author Jerome Corsi describes this Fox-Bush autobahn, container ships from China would unload at Lazaro Cardenas, a port named for the Mexican president who nationalized all U.S. oil companies in 1938. From there, trucks with Mexican drivers would run fast lines into the United States, hauling their cargo to a U.S. customs inspection terminal — in Kansas City, Mo. From there, the trucks would fan out across America or roll on into Canada. Similar super-highways from Mexico through the United States into Canada are planned.
According to Corsi, construction of the Trans-Texas Corridor, the first leg of the NAFTA Super Highway, is to begin next year.
The beneficiaries of this NAFTA Super Highway project would be the contractors who build it and the importers and outlet stores for the Chinese-manufactured goods that would come flooding in. The losers would be U.S. longshoremen, truckers, manufacturers and taxpayers.
The latter would pay the cost of building the highway in Mexico and the United States, both in dollars and in the lost sovereignty of our once-independent American republic.
So says Pat Buchanan over at Town Hall. That column ends with the cheery note that Pat Buchanan is the author of many books including State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. And if you think he’s the only wing nut bellyaching about the secret plan to replace sovereign America with a North American Union by way of a superhighway from Mexico to Canada you are sadly mistaken. Here’s winger Phyllis Schlafly keeping tabs on the plot over at the Eagle Forum…
Plans call for a ten-lane limited-access highway to parallel I-35. It would have three lanes each way for passenger cars, two express lanes each way for trucks, rail lines both ways for people and freight, plus a utility corridor for oil and natural gas pipelines, electric towers, cables for communication, and telephone lines.
Central to this plan is a massive taking of 584,000 acres of farm and ranch land at an estimated cost of $11 to $30 billion, property then lost from the tax rolls of counties and school districts. After the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London, no one need worry about the power of eminent domain to take private property.
The Trans-Texas Corridor will be the first leg of what has been dubbed the NAFTA Super Highway to go through heartland America all the way to Canada. This would be a major lifeline of the plan to merge the United States into a North American Community
Ask some members of Congress about plans to build a "NAFTA superhighway" connecting Mexico and Canada via the U.S. and you might hear snickers.
Some officials will tell you they have seen no "earmarks" for such a plan and question whether it even exists.
But the plan does exist and the NAFTA superhighway is being built – under the radar screen.
One need look no further than the $286 billion highway bill signed into law earlier this month by President Bush for some of the "earmarks."
The measure gave the state of Tennessee more than $111 million to help plan and build Interstate 69, called "one of the most significant transportation projects in the region’s history" by the Commercial Appeal.
No one in Tennessee has any doubts about plans for the NAFTA superhighway. It is being built now with federal taxpayer dollars. And the plan calls for I-69 to extend from Michigan to Texas, linking the Canadian and Mexican borders.
Those supporting the plan, like Transportation Secretary Mario Cino, say it will bring an unprecedented windfall not only to the regions it traverses but for all Americans, Mexicans and Canadians.
Tennessee Department of Transportation Commissioner Gerald Nicely said I-69 "could help position the western part of the state as one of the world’s new economic centers of power in the global marketplace."
The entire I-69 project is expected to cost $8.8 billion in current dollars, with states picking up 10 percent of the tab. So where is the money hidden? It’s not really. But nowhere in any highway bill is the project referred to as the "NAFTA superhighway." Since the money is doled out to states to spend on their portion of the project, the allocations look like any other highway spending.
Ultimately, the Tennessee portion of the I-69 project is expected to cost $1 billion. It will shadow the present route of U.S. 51, connecting towns like Union City, Troy, Dyersburg, Ripley, Covington and Millington before following what is now I-40/240 through Midtown, according to the Commercial Appeal. The new highway bill focuses on the portion of I-69 through Northwest Tennessee about 80-110 miles north of Memphis. A 20-mile section of that segment – a four-lane stretch of U.S. 51 between Dyersburg and Troy – already is completed. Signs label it as part of the "Future I-69 Corridor." That leaves a 19-mile section to be built from Troy to the Kentucky line before one-third of the I-69 route through Tennessee is completed.
"The route’s already been laid out, with survey markers planted in fields and cryptic benchmarks painted on the pavement of country roads," reports the Commercial Appeal.
Ohhhh…Cryptic Benchmarks…! What they really need to do is number the new highway ‘666’ and maybe they’ll all have heart attacks. For a good debunking of all this right wing paranoia, see the August 2007 article in The Nation, titled The NAFTA Superhighway. It’s a case study in how the eternally paranoid right takes random scraps of fact and weaves them into super secret conspiracies against red-blooded true-blue 100 percent Americans. I’m old enough to remember the hysteria over fluoridation, that communist plot to poison the precious bodily fluids of Americans. No…that wasn’t some little bit of comedy Stanley Kubrick’s writers came up with for Dr. Strangelove. It was a real right wing conspiracy theory back then, and for all I know they probably still believe it.
But what if Corsi and friends are wrong? What if the yellow cloud surrounding I-35 isn’t an “invasion” from Mexico but an “invasion” of God? That, apparently, is the theory of the youth-oriented church activists profiled on yesterday’s “700 Club,” who are running “purity sieges” at clinics and porn shops, where they claim to be “moving angels and demons” by, for example, “setting free” an inebriated young man from “the desires to be with men” through the laying of hands at a gay bar.
While the CBN report doesn’t mention NAFTA or a North American Union, the suspicious highway is central to the story:
A number of Christians have come to believe, because of recent prophecies, dreams, and visions, that I-35 is the highway spoken in Isaiah 35, verse 8: “And a highway will be there, it will be called the way of holiness.”
… [Heartland Ministries’ Hill] believes God has an awesome plan that starts along I-35. “Let’s draw a line in the center of America, set people on fire, get young people saved, get moms and dads saved, get churches on fire, get holy, and watch how it affects the rest of America.”
“What do we expect to see?” [said Cindy Jacob.] “We expect laws to be changed in cities. We expect righteous leaders. We expect a movement, a reformation that will literally sweep the face of the earth.”
Lovely… I’m thinking Pat, with his south African diamond mines and other international investments, has some interest in making sure NAFTA doesn’t suddenly go sour on him. So he found himself a bible verse to calm the rubes down with. But maybe he really does believe it. Welcome to the intersection of Batshit Crazy and Fucking Nuts. Otherwise known as the republican grassroots.
On The Other Hand, Maybe Germans Are Starting To Resemble Americans…
On the one hand there’s Bernd das Brot…and on the other, there’s The Gummibär…
Ich Liebe Eine Gummibär. I first saw this YouTube on the Slog blog, bearing the headline Worse then Hitler, or just the New Crazy Frog? I had no idea until I searched for it again on Google that Gummy Bears originated in Germany (Gummibär is “Rubber Bear” in German). But this is a bit much. Supposedly this is a craze in Germany right now, but every German I’ve seen commenting on it hates it. I’m sparing you the long version. It’s enough to make me go stare at my wallpaper.
[Update…] Alas, I can no longer embed the short version as the bastard disabled embedding on it. So now I have to serve up the long version instead. Hate me.
For the millions of fans on our planet and beyond, our new line of STAR TREK urns, caskets, monuments and vaults will be an important discovery indeed. After ten movies and five television series, phrases like “Live long and prosper,” “Resistance is futile” and “Space: the final frontier” have become part of our global vocabulary.
Monuments and vaults will also debut next year. The Eternal Image STAR TREK line is licensed for sale in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Korea and Japan.
The first two products to debut will be the STAR TREK urns and caskets.
Like any other human being on this earth, I have my own little obsessions. They’ve given me hours and hours of enjoyment in this life. I don’t need to be buried in them however.
The original intent of the forum, according to Coalition of Conscience director Dr. Michael Brown, was to have an open and honest dialogue between the Coalition of Conscience and members of the Charlotte-area gay & gay-friendly clergy.
Brown said he had invited members of the clergy from thirteen area churches – including the New Life Metropolitan Community Church, MCC of Charlotte, Myers Park Baptist Church, St. Martin’ & St. Peter’s Episcopal Churches, Holy Covenant UCC and Jay Bakker’s Revolution Church. Brown also said up to 500 personal invitations to the event were handed out at the Pride Charlotte festival at the end of August. He also noted that this was his third or fourth attempt at organizing a public discussion on issues of sexuality & Christianity with members of the Charlotte-area LGBT community.
…
“We want to open a door of grace to the gay & lesbian community. We are convinced from the Scriptures that Jesus is against homosexual practice. We are equally convinced that Jesus died for homosexual and heterosexual alike,” Brown said, “We know there is a lot of misunderstanding. We know that a lot of gays and lesbians have been driven out of churches as if homosexuality was the worst of all sins…. Just by saying, ‘Let’s talk about it,’ hopefully we can break a wall down there.”
Oh how…neighborly…
Uhm…well…sort of….
At the beginning of the forum, however, Brown made his point very clear: One cannot be gay & Christian, or rather, one cannot be a self-affirming gay person and Christian:
“If you mean, can I be a devoted follower of Jesus while struggling with unwanted sexual desires, while saying I know these are wrong, I resist them, I don’t give into them, I do not practice homosexuality, I’m celibate and I’m abstaining from these things and my goal is to be pure in front of the Lord, but I’m still struggling with these things… Can you be gay and follow Jesus? In that sense, yes. And that’s the same as a heterosexual struggling with lust, desire, temptation outside of wedlock. However, if you mean can I practice homosexuality? Can I engage in romantic and same-sex relationships and does God endorse those things and can I be a follower of Jesus at the same time? The answer is absolutely, categorically no. The Scripture leaves no room to question that.”
(Emphasis mine…) Oh. Well there’s nothing to talk about after all then is there?
Sometimes, It’s The Things That Surprise Them That Are The Most Telling
Andrew Sullivan apparently missed out on a wee little bit of gay American history, as he had to go look it up…
The same people who have been telling me for years that Jerry Falwell is an anachronistic irrelevance are now singing his praises as a pivotal figure in American politics and culture. Presumably that’s why all the Republican candidates had to bow the knee at the moment of his passing. Dean Barnett recommends this reminiscence by Al Mohler. Money quote:
As a 16-year-old boy, I was in the crowd at the convention center in Miami Beach when Dr. Falwell joined singer Anita Bryant in holding a rally to involve Christians in the struggle against a gay rights ordinance adopted by Dade County. I had never heard of Jerry Falwell until that night – and after that experience I would never forget him.
Er…Wiki?? I don’t think there’s a gay American who was past puberty and self aware at the time who would fucking need to look thAT one up. Yes, Andrew, that was the Dade County non-discrimination ordinance she waged an all-out war on. Yes, all it did was protect us from being fired, simply for being gay. And yes, she based a large portion of her campaign on calling gay people pedophiles. She fucking named her campaign Save Our Children after all, didn’t she.
And that rally that Albert "Let’s Exterminate Homosexuality In The Womb" Mohler says he’ll never forget? I suppose there are a lot of people who won’t forget it. I saw some of the news footage of Falwell and Bryant standing together at the podium. I remember vividly Falwell looking solemnly at the gathered reporters and saying "A homosexual will kill you, as soon as look at you."
Just a few years after Falwell and Bryant were standing together at the podium with Falwell telling everyone what a bunch of blood thirsty killers gay people are, Ronald Reagan was courting him in his presidential campaign. The elephant has made gay bashing one of its primary vote getting tools ever since. I guess if you’d actually lived through that part of our history Andrew, you’d know why so many of us feel nothing but contempt for the republican party. Lame and cowardly as the democrats often are, they’re haven’t been busily inciting fear and hate toward us for the past few decades, simply to win elections. How many gay people have died Andrew, because of the climate of hate the republicans have actively stoked in this country? How many gay kids sent off to ex-gay camps? How many kids growing being hated by their peers, growing up hating themselves?
Yes…it’s the party of torture now, isn’t it? But you had to know this day was coming Andrew, when they threw innocent lovers to the wolves back in the 1980s, because it won them elections. Lovers, Andrew. Not terrorists. Not murderers. Not jihadists. Lovers. Because it won them elections. A race to the bottom is always won by the people who are already there.
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