Bren's Left Coast

Week 3 - What I've learned

2012-02-09T19:45:00.000-08:00

Can't believe it's already been three weeks.

After close observation, Dhakans flail when walking down the street, just like I do. They bob and weave and get stuck behind a porter carrying what looks like two 50 pound bags of cement mix on his head, just like I do.They get trapped between two rickshaws, just like I do. They get marooned on the islands in between the seas of vehicular traffic, just like I do. They step out into the street to avoid the human scrum on the sidewalk only to have a pick set by a CNG, pulling them up short and forcing a retreat back to the sidewalk, just like I do. This makes me happier than I’d like to admit.
A “decimal” is a unit of area which, despite sounding metric, is actually 1/100^th of an acre. It’s obsolete everywhere except in some parts of rural Bangladesh and some parts of Annam in India, where it’s still used to measure household plots. Farmers use it around the Teknaf and Chunati forest reserves. Good luck converting that to hectares.
It can take three hours to go 45 kilometers, or two hours to go 15 km. Traffic is gridlocked around the capital for much of the time. Red lights mean nothing. Horns are used all the time, though for what I’m not sure since no one heeds them. (And when I say “all the time” – that is only slight hyperbole. On a three hour drive last weekend from Jessore to the end of the road in SW Bangladesh, the longest the driver went without using his horn while I was awake was 45 seconds. I fell asleep in self defense.) On side streets, sometimes a horn from behind can tell your rickshaw driver to make way, but many times, where’s he gonna go?
If you are so inclined to give to beggars on the street, keep your small money handy, like in your shirt pocket vs. your pants pocket, so it’s less awkward and so you don’t have to pull your wallet out. If you give while stuck in traffic, either pedestrian or vehicular, your action will attract many, many others – especially as a foreigner. Proceed as you wish.
Bangladesh has a bag ban! No "poly" (i.e., plastic) bags. And it's mostly observed. Bags in stores will be made of jute (locally grown) or instead of a bag you'll get a net made from jute or hemp.
Carrots are in season, and are delicious. You can buy them nearly anywhere, including sitting in traffic. Though again, if you buy anything – carrots, popcorn, BAUs (sour apples the size of an egg, so-called because they were developed at Bangladesh Agricultural University), a laminated guide to the fresh water fish of Bangladesh, improbably – while stuck in traffic, you will most certainly be approached by many, many more vendors.
I defy you to find a green vegetable in Dhaka - and I mean a leafy green vegetable, not a pepper or a cucumber. I went out for a fancy meal the other night, for a change of pace, and the menu said "House salad: mixed greens and tomato." I got a bed of peppers and a cherry tomato. Tasty, but... not quite what I was thinking I'd get.
Next time I'm bringing packets of instant oatmeal.
Lots of garments are made here, and lots of irregulars stay here. There was a guy with a “Wrenesto Che Guevera” shirt. The pink shirt that looked like it’d lost a fight with a bedazzler I saw tonight on a 30 year old I sure hope was an irregular.
Hoodies are a surprisingly common sartorial choice here. Saw a guy, mid twenties, full beard, skull cap, Islamic dress, wearing an “Old Navy” hoodie tonight. You see them on males everywhere: your 30 year old rickshaw driver, the 20 something passing you in the street, the 65 year old shopkeeper.
Many people walk around with English slogans on their clothes that don't always mean what they think it means. The guy at the mall yesterday with the “boy crazy” shirt may have been, but my money is on something getting lost in translation. The shirt worn by our van driver to the National Park yesterday read “My heart beats all day,” in big block letters. That is surely accurate, as far as it goes.
Bangladesh is conservative country in terms of dress. Even for a field trip to a National Park the expectation was absolutely for a collared shirt (as we were there for official business), and the preference was for a button down shirt and dress slacks. They don’t have to match or to be new, but that’s the protocol. I’ve not seen anyone in shorts outside of the gym, and even there I’ve taken to wearing my sweats.
Gender. I’m still observing and trying to understand gender here. It’s complex and nuanced and I haven’t figured it out. There are women in very public roles here, including both the current and previous prime minister, and you see many women in the street, on buses, driving - this isn’t (our ally) Saudi Arabia. Most women in Dhaka wear a sari, and most of them have something on their heads, though not a full covering – usually the back third. They are scarf-like, brightly colored, and draw further attention it seems. And the women here certainly are attractive. You will see some women in full burkas on the street in Dhaka, and a higher percentage out in the country side. This ain't California, either. Women are presented as "other" in a way I’m not used to considering. This should be its own post.
Global English is different than what native speakers use with each other, of course – it’s a lingua franca that is leached of its beauty, often, but there are charming turns of phrase that pop up every once in a while. (When's the last time you used "bestowed"?) “Available” is used as a catch all for “there is”or "there are" - in the Sundarbans last weekend we were told that “Bengal tigers are available in the forest” and “monkeys are available also.” I didn’t ask to see a menu.
Many sounds in Bangla are very similar to Japanese. I swear I've heard "Nandaka" every day, but when I look there is not a Japanese-looking person available. (Except for earlier this week at breakfast, when there was.)
The present perfect as a tense isn’t well understood in spoken English here, even by people with pretty advanced skills. In writing it shows up all the time for the simple past, but in speaking it's pretty consistently going to throw someone for a loop. You can see them replaying the question in their minds and looking for the verb, particularly with irregular English verbs. Instead of asking "Have you been there before?" you'll get further ahead by asking "First time (place/ experience)?" and point at them. The present progressive is, however, available. For simple present. Or for simple future. All the time.
On the street in Dhaka, the penetration and quality of English is very high, the highest I've seen in Asia outside of Singapore. Better than Hong Kong, from what I remember. It's just that I am editing for eight hours a day.
The English language TV options are pretty limited (so I turn it on sometimes. So?), but where has Supernatural been all my life?

Week 2 - What I've learned

2012-02-06T05:25:00.000-08:00

It's not the food in Bangladesh that I don't love, it's the food in Dhaka, or maybe mostly our hotel. Went out to the countryside last weekend where I had the best shrimp I've ever had, and chicken tandoori on the grill (I know, but they called it tandoori), and crab the size of a mastodon. All amazing.
I don't know what's second, but cricket is first in terms of national pastimes, by a long shot. Everywhere there is open space, you'll see Bangladeshi boys and young men playing cricket, even if it's with a bamboo stick and a homemade ball. I've seen two badminton courts, one soccer pitch, and countless games of cricket underway - on the sidewalk, on the roof of a building, by a school, on the railroad tracks - everywhere.
When drinking from a water bottle, don't put your lips to it, even if it's your own and it's small - that precludes you from offering a drink to someone else. (Drinking water from a bottle lip-free requires practice. I recommend trying when you're by yourself, so you don't blort water all down your front.)
Eating with a spoon is okay at meals. They've all told me so. ( Though I accept that might just be them taking pity on me after watching me flail as I try to eat with my hands.)
Don't get lulled into a false sense of security from not having had any digestive issues so far; don't accidentally drink the tap water when brushing your teeth or rinse your mouth out in the shower or eat something that's wet.
Although at times it can't be helped. When a farmer gives you a freshly picked fruit that's wet, what are you going to do? Only one thing to do, really - you dry it and eat it. When you walk back to the road from his farm, and you see the kids knocking the fruit off the tree into a small pond with goats standing around it that is roughly the color of the Chicago River on St Patrick's Day, well... you don't think about it.
Plan ahead for digestive issues and pack your Tums, Pepto, and Immodium. And stay hydrated.
The ubiquitous Nescafe does not have the same effect on one's digestive tract as, say, a cup of brewed diner coffee would, sadly. And the less said about all of this, the better.
Give up your sense of personal space. It's crowded. When in a crowd and immobilized, hold on to the person in front, and don't be surprised if someone behind you touches your shirt or shoulder. You will also likely get asked questions, in this circumstance.
Whoever invented Frogger probably tried to cross the road here (left) when the idea came. That inventor might also not have had the assist from the local that I got: after watching me for a couple of minutes look apprehensively in the direction of oncoming traffic, a man mid 60's, full beard and skull cap, live duck upside down in his right hand, took his left hand, placed it on my forearm and said "Wait." And then he got on the traffic side of me and said "Come." I waited and I went, and he and his duck went off wherever they were going once I was safely across. Without his help, I'd likely still be there. (And just when I'd thought I had mastered crossing the roads here, too.)
Bengladeshis tend not to smile for photos. They can be beaming but once you aim your camera at them they often pull a serious face. The boy that was sure-footedly piloting our boat (that's the rudder on top of his foot) through the mouths of the Ganges for much of the day Sunday, incessantly wearing a big, toothy smile, would consistently look like this when I'd pull the camera out (right). He laughed as soon as I snapped it. (Looking back he may have just been having some sport with me. Fair enough. He was awesome.)
Bus stops are sorta wherever the driver wants to slow down enough so you can hop on. You'll have better luck in numbers, it seems; even on busy highways buses will pull over and slow down if there are three or four people waiting. And notice I didn't say "stop" - they usually don't.
Always have "small money" or 100 taka notes or smaller. No one can break a 500 taka note (about $6.50) - not at the domestic terminal at the airport, not at the coffee shop, not at the corner mini mart. In Japan I'd walk into a 7-11 and buy a pack of gum with the equivalent of a hundred dollar bill and they wouldn't bat an eye; here, get small money whenever you can.
ATMs let you withdraw sums in 100 t increments. Always either go up 400 or down 100 so you have some walking around money.
Dang, do I wish it would rain. This air could use a scrubbing.

Walking

2012-02-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

Almost every night I go for a walk. Some nights it’s easier than others, but so far, only once did I walk downstairs to my room after nine hours of reading and editing in the conference room, hunker down with reading and writing (and the Simpsons – on at 9:00 pm), and stay in for the night. When am I going to be here again? I like to go out and see what I can see.

There’s a lot to be seen.

When taking a walk in Dhaka, you have to keep alert. For starters, watch ’s above you. That's so you don’t electrocute yourself. Literally. There is a story in the paper every morning, literally, about someone who has died from electrocution, and while many of them were trying to run a line to those already strung up, I’m pretty certain that the wiring in Dhaka is not UL certified. In fact, I’m pretty certain a UL certifier would take one look, shake his or her head, and get back on a flight out of town. If there are government regulations about the electricity, they are, like many other regulations here, ignored. And why not? The “government” has no power to impose a collective will on 15 million Dhakans, so people do what they like. The black electrical wires (left) that are hanging at head level, if you’re over 5’7”, which seems to be the median height here, are most likely not live. Most likely. Why take the chance? Keep your eyes open, look up, and duck, bob and weave as needed to avoid contact. You don’t want to be the guy they write about in the paper.

But don’t just look up – if you do that, you’ll likely break an ankle. You have to look down, too. Most of the main streets have sidewalks, of some sort, but those sidewalks are not in a particularly well maintained state. And they double as commercial space. Anyone who wants can throw out a blanket (or not), pay the local mob boss or corrupt politician or police officer (that part isn’t optional, according to my Bangladeshi acquaintances), and sell stuff.

From the main corner to my hotel (a distance of 600 meters), you can buy, in order: shoes, porcelain bathroom fixtures, peanut brittle of some kind, men's underwear, tires, oranges, belt buckles, deep fried dough (donuts?) of some kind, cigarettes of all kinds, bedroom furniture, haircuts, and between almost every one, eggs.

Whatever you want, presumably, except alcohol. What’s interesting is that everywhere there is retail commercial activity in Dhaka, there is an economy of agglomeration – one guy with a sidewalk stand selling men’s briefs will be surrounded by four or five others selling men’s briefs. (And how many men, walking home, soil themselves or otherwise need new briefs? Seems odd to me. They are also sold in 7-11s in Japan, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.) This agglomeration isn’t just for sidewalk enterprises; even in the more formalized spaces for retail (a/k/a “malls” but they look and feel pretty different than the malls we think of) a watch shop, say, will be next to 4 or five others selling watches. Rickshaw down the road past the pet stores, and there are, literally, more than 30 pet stores - even more, the bird stores are all together, as are the reptile stores, the goldfish stores - you get what I mean. It's fascinating. There is no zoning requirement (zoning, in Dhaka?! Ha!) for this, it just seems to be naturally occurring.

So walk along, looking up to avoid the wires and looking down to avoid stepping on a belt buckle or egg vendor. Or to avoid stepping in rubbish in the street.

My first semester in my MURP program at UH Mānoa, I was examining urban planning in a city in the Philippines and I presented to the class a case study of garbage collection. The city in question (I've forgotten which but it was the size of Indianapolis, so about a million residents) had acquired a fleet of garbage trucks through a one off grant from the Philippines national government, and with these there was now a closed system: garbage didn't go into the street, wasn't transferred multiple times (from residence/ business, to street, to truck, to collection point, to city garbage dump) - it was clean, efficient and hygienic. I thought this was a good thing for livability and public health, and saw it as a small but good step forward. That's how I presented it.

My prof ripped me a new one. "What about the people who make their living by going through the garbage for food and materials for recycle and sale? How many garbage pickers are now going to be unemployed - and thus face the very real threat of starvation - because they don't have access to this resource? Are there any provisions in the grant or the city plan to accommodate these people? How would you respond to a claim that this was a transfer of funds from a poor central government to the middle class?"

After I stood in front of the class for what felt like an hour, more or less imitating a goldfish, I stammered that I'd like to present again next week, if that would be okay, and do some more research. It was a great lesson for me - who are the stakeholders, and how are they affected? How are the poor affected by livability issues? I read about garbage pickers in the Philippines for a week, I presented again to the class, and that prof and I got to be on terms.

So there is garbage on the street. And it smells, and it's still winter here. I can imagine that in the summer, your senses would be frequently assaulted - on walks now, your senses are more... jostled (fumes from the furniture or tire shops, say) than assaulted really. But that garbage represents the livelihoods of many. Many. One night out to dinner with two colleagues, one American and one Bangladeshi, there was some confusion on the order and we got four dishes for the three of us. Despite our best efforts we couldn't finish it, so some food went back to the kitchen. I always hate to waste food, but in such a poor country as this it seems particularly offensive.

Walking home, I realized that the food we didn't eat would quite possibly be eaten by someone else, out of the garbage pile (depending on how it was thrown away); and if not then it most certainly would get eaten by a stray dog. People live off garbage - from home or business to street; from street to common neighborhood garbage heap; from garbage heap to truck (left) - at each stage the garbage is gone through and examined for anything that may be of use or may be scavenged, reclaimed and sold. As you walk, keep your eyes open for that.

And breathe through your nose. There is a lot of dust, lead, and fumes in the air, and you don't want that all to end up in your lungs, so breathe through your nose. And not only dust - Bangladesh has the 2nd worst air quality in the world, ahead of only India, and Dhaka has the worst in the world (click the link for some grim reading). Yes, you will blow disgusting black stuff out later, but where would you rather it be?

You will also want to be scanning from side to side as you walk. There are a number of small driveways and side alleys and an innumerable amount of people. Rickshaws, CNGs, cars, and men and boys carrying improbably large loads on their heads can enter and exit at anytime. Yesterday I was almost taken out by the metric equivalent of a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood - one of three simultaneously being balanced on the head of a worker, navigating down the narrow sidewalk. (Without an intervention by a thoughtful Bengali, I would have been - I had just glanced up at the wiring.) The gentlemen in the picture at the right are carrying what has to be their weight in produce. I want to rush to my chiropractor every time I see it. I have seen people carrying a roughly queen sized bed frame, a large bag of cement mix, a bundle of 8' (okay probably 2 meters, but you get me) long PVC pipe and aluminum poles, and bags of rice, many, many times. It's astounding. And it requires vigilance.

So - scan side to side to avoid losing an eye (or your whole head) to something being carried, scan at your feet to avoid stepping on someone's goods for sale or into something unsavory, scan at eye level and up for wires to avoid electrocution. And breathe through your nose. And if you feel like a slightly spastic bobblehead, then you're probably being appropriately aware.

One of my colleagues goes for a walk in the early morning, which he says is much more relaxing. It can't be less relaxing, though it might be less interesting. I'll try it, and see how it goes.
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What am I doing?

2012-01-30T09:39:00.000-08:00

Some of you have asked what I'm doing here. I'll try to explain it.

There is a forest in northeastern Bangladesh, a small nub of a forest that’s nearly all that’s left of a huge semi tropical jungle that used to cover thousands of square kilometers. That forest has been declared a reserve, which limits the kinds of activities you can do within its borders. The 20 Asian elephants who live in that reserve need it; they’ve got no place else to go.

Asian elephants are a keystone species, which means that a forest that can support elephants is a healthy forest. Elephants need a lot of space and a lot of variety – banana groves, scrub, patches of old growth forest, water – and an ecosystem that has that variety and abundance is going to be healthy. The tricky thing, though, is that elephants help to make a healthy forest – they maintain the ecosystem by clearing underbrush and keeping some plant growth in check. Their presence means it’s healthy, their presence makes it healthy. They can only do that if there’s enough forest there to sustain them, though. It’s a delicate balance.

Around that forest reserve are thousands of people. Literally thousands, in villages all around, and in some cases within, the boundaries of that reserve. Most (estimates are more than 80%) of those thousands of people are at subsistence levels. They are living off the land, or if they are in the market economy (selling forest products or fish at the market), they are living on less than 80 taka (80 BDT = about US $1) a day.

Once that forest was declared a reserve, many of them were in danger of losing their livelihoods. For many, if they can’t collect timber or non-timber resources from that forest – honey, medicinal plants to sell at the market, fruit, banana and bamboo for food, fuelwood, and fibers for clothes - they will starve to death. When you’re living at subsistence level, your margin of error is very, very small. That’s what subsistence means.

The national government of Bangladesh declared that forest a reserve, in an effort to protect the habitat of an endangered species. The national government of Bangladesh is seated in Dhaka, only 300 km away from this forest reserve, but the condition of infrastructure is so bad that it is, at best, a 10 hour journey by road to get here. The local forest department officials maybe do their best. Maybe they don’t. Maybe on their salary of a couple hundred taka a day, there are opportunities to be had if they look the other way if some harvesting of forest products is going on. Maybe the local government official is in the same position.

The elephants need the forests, or they’ll die. The people need the forests, or they’ll starve. The government is remote, corrupt, and ineffective, and can’t protect the irreplaceable resource of the forest. If the forest isn’t protected, the villagers' children and grandchildren will have no way to make a living. It’s in everyone’s long term interest to protect the resource, but no one has the short term capacity to protect the resource – there’s too much immediate pressure on it.

How do you solve this?

I don’t know.

But I know what hasn’t worked: unilateral decisions, declared top-down by a weak central state with no capacity to enforce its laws. That’s not the solution.

People a lot smarter than me with a lot more experience than me have spent their lives on finding answers to these kinds of issues. I’m just here in Dhaka at this month long writing workshop to help those people rigorously evaluate what’s already been done and what’s being done now to maximize the chances of resource management, for all of the stakeholders – the villagers, current and future; the forests; and the elephants. There are practitioners from all over Bangladesh here (I just used the elephant example because it’s the sexiest; there are people here who have worked in wetlands and other natural resource preservation). The attendees are the people who will be conducting research and making forest and fishery policy in Bangladesh for the next 35 years.

Why a writing workshop? What does that yield? First, it gives people from across the country and across sectors a chance to learn what is working and what isn’t, and to adjust policy accordingly. Second, it’s building the capacity of resource managers by honing their skills (research design, publication standards) to analyze their and others’ work in the field in a rigorous, peer reviewable way, which will allow them to apply for grants and NGO support in future. Third, many past participants in the workshop have used the experience here – and their finished papers from here – to apply successfully for PhDs, further building capacity in Bangladesh as they come home to work in resource management.

And the cool thing is that there looks to be some solutions.

When I got my master's in Urban Planning, this is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about - protecting resources while finding ways for the maximum number of people to live sustainably as was possible. Finding win-win solutions because that's really all that we can do in situations like this. We have to find solutions. What are the options besides that? There are none. I'm not deluded into thinking that I am making a huge hell of a difference, but we've got to try on some of these things.

This is a USAID funded project. ( More information here: http://www.usaid.gov/bd/programs/environ_response.html )

It is an honor to be here on behalf of the American people. It's in America's best interest, of course - a stable, democratic, secularly governed, majority Muslim Bangladesh is absolutely in America's best interest, and a Bangladesh with an impoverished landless class would be a humanitarian tragedy and a geopolitical nightmare (remember, Bangladesh has more people than Russia or Japan; it's the 7th most populous nation in the world, and they live in a space slightly smaller than the state of Iowa) - but far more than that, a healthy planet with healthy people is in all of our best interests.

The people I'm working with and learning from are officials who are doing the right thing, despite an enervated and corrupt government and long odds, and who are trying to find the best solutions there are. I'm privileged to support them.

I'm lucky to be here.

Week 1 - what I've learned

2012-01-27T06:19:00.000-08:00

One week in Dhaka tells me as much about Bangladesh as one week walking around Michigan and Wacker would tell you about the United States - i.e., “not much.” BUT - I’m not extrapolating to the whole country, or even to the whole city of 15 million from the 2-3 km radius I’ve seen, so here’s some of what I’ve learned:

Never, ever, lose your forward momentum while walking around Dhaka. Slow down when you have to, take stutter steps if you need to, bob and weave, but keep moving forward. Stop for that rickshaw or CNG taxi coming out of a side alley, regaining your spot in the flow of people will take a while.
Even if math isn’t your strong suit, learn some base-80 calculations since $1 = 80 taka. A rickshaw ride across town for 35 taka? A hell of a deal. A one day gym pass for 2000 taka? Less good. (Wait, what? $25 bucks to use the gym for one day? In a country where the average daily wage is $1.60? Did I do that math right? Sadly, no, I didn't. Not in time.)
Be seen going into the wash room before lunch. (And no, that’s not a euphemism, it’s a separate room off the dining room with two sinks and nothing more.) Wash. Sit down to lunch and keep your left hand off the table. At all times. If you have to, you can drink your water with your left hand or pass food with it, but you shouldn’t use it for anything else. Eat with your hands, or, more accurately, with your right hand. Make balls of rice and curry or dal or fish or whatever is on the menu for lunch, and put it into your mouth with your right hand. Some at your table may lick their fingers when they’ve finished – the whole finger. Proceed as you wish. (The wait staff may take pity on you as they see you flailing, trying to eat non-tacky white rice ham-fistedly, and discreetly slip you a fork, but you can’t always count on that.) Be seen going into the wash room after lunch.
It’s not impolite to stare in this culture. You’re gonna get stared at. Staring back is not considered rude and can lead to a conversation.
When walking around the city people will stare but people will also ask questions. Usually, in order:

What country are you from? (“USA” is the quickest way to comprehension, though “UK” and “Canada” also work pretty quickly. I’m egalitarian that way. Saying “United States” draws looks of incomprehension, at first, and “America” does too, which surprised me)
You married? (which often sounds like “merit”, e.g., “you merit?” – if you want to presume it’s merit and that you are, in fact, meritorious, roll with it),
How long stay in Bangladesh? (answer in weeks)
First time in Bangladesh?
Do you like Bangladesh? (of course you say yes, and if you want to be effusive add some detail, like "good food" or "very friendly people"…)

With the completely disarming young school girls (grade 3 and grade 5, and sisters, I’d say?), who approached me in a narrow side street, still in their uniforms, to practice their English, I had a more extensive conversation – what’s my name, do I like music, how old am I. I was impressed by their willingness to try. They’d walk along next to me, thinking of the next question, preface it with “uncle, uncle…” and then fire away.

What from a distance at first glance looks like a drug deal isn’t – it’s a passerby slipping alms into a blind beggar's palm.
What smells like marijuana smoke as you are walking through the tiny, narrow alleys between two main streets is marijuana smoke. Back up, pretending to find something to take a picture of just to make sure, and oh, yeah, there’s no doubt about that. Huhn.
The slight downward tilt of the head to the left many Bangladeshi males will make as response to questions or statements means “no problem” or “you’re welcome” or “we’ll see.” It depends. It's endearing.
Tea breaks are part of the cadence of life in Bangladesh. They occur at 10 or 10:30 or so in the morning; lunch is late, at 1:30 or 2, and then tea break will occur again at 4 or so. Morning tea break will come with something savory, like a samosa; afternoon tea break comes with “biscuits” in the British sense of the word. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the coconut ones – really nice.
Coffee, universally, is instant Nescafé, and is often served along with the tea bags at tea break. “Chai” in Bangla simply means “tea”, not a specific kind of tea. Tea is served with non-dairy creamer and sugar.
Dinner is often late. Like 9:00 pm late.
Don’t cross your legs, as you may inadvertently “point” the sole of your foot at someone, and the sole of your foot is unclean. Fair enough given what is on the footpaths of Dhaka. (I’m getting a stronger sense of the degree of insult involved when that journalist threw his shoe at President Bush.) Crossing at your ankles is okay.
Bloke at the gym walking around in his “Staff” shirt carrying a racket is not, as first thought, making his presence known so that if you fancy a game on the squash court but are tavelling solo, you’ll have a partner. He is pest control – the racket is a portable bug zapper. I’d seen them before, in Thailand, but I had never seen them wielded inside.
If you want your room cleaned, you leave your key at the front desk. Otherwise, they won’t clean it. Figured that out on day four, when I was really starting to need fresh towels and more bottled water (to drink, yes, but also to brush my teeth).
Watching Vin Diesel is not diminished when the movie is dubbed into Hindi. His delivery of dialog is not what makes him watchable, it has to be said.
Blokes walking down the street holding hands – not locked at the elbows, but holding hands – or one with his hand on the other’s forearm, walking very close, are not likely to be lovers. I’m glad staring isn’t considered rude, because, honestly, the first time, I stared. I was so surprised at that (among everything else in a very surprising frenetic and colorful street scape, it was still surprising) I had to make sure I'd seen what I saw. Two guys, Western clothes, late teens, hand in hand. Every time I've seen it since, I’ve been charmed by the facile male intimacy, but not deluded into thinking it portends more than it does. Nice custom, though.
People on their cell phones do not pay attention to anyone or anything around them. Some things are universal.

I reserve the right to revise these when I learn that everything I've learned so far is wrong, which I freely admit could happen.

Except for #17. You can take that to the bank.

Building

2012-01-24T17:37:00.000-08:00

It’s the dry season so there is a lot of dust in the air over Dhaka, and visibility is limited to about a mile. Within that distance from my 8^th floor window are more than 20 clearly identifiable construction sites. I feel like I’ve struck gold. Just like attending a wedding can tell you a lot about a country's religious and family life, I've found that observing a construction site can tell you a lot about a country, too: capitalization, labor supply and division, gender relations, even ritual. In Japan, every construction site had at least one employee - helmeted, uniformed and gloved - at pedestrian interface points to bow to passers-by, apologizing for the noise and dust. All employees were uniformed, hard hatted, and goggled, and all scaffolding was securely built and completely wrapped in mesh. The level of mechanization was very high with a lot of heavy machinery on every site, no matter how small, and the machinery was left on site, unguarded, where it was easily accessible and never accessed (well, except maybe for a drunk salaryman sitting in the driver's seat and moving the gears back and forth with boyish delight, which I saw one night in Gifu).

From this you could reasonably conclude that the Japanese culture valued order; that there was more capital than labor, or at least enough capital that most jobs could be done by machine; that it was tightly regulated society; that worker safety was paramount; and that property crimes and vandalism were not a common occurrence.

Well... Dhaka ain't Nagoya. At the site directly across the street from me, an eight story concrete and brick residential complex (below right) is being built completely by hand. I haven’t seen or heard one piece of equipment. Bricks are hauled up to the roof by pulley, concrete is mixed on the sidewalk in front with a hoe and water from a bucket, then it is scooped into baskets that women hoist to the top of their heads and carry around to the side of the building, then it is hauled up to where the work is being done. I could walk into the site anytime as it is completely open to the street, not cordoned or screened off in any way. It’s fascinating to watch, especially as I am on floor eight in a building that was most likely built in just the same way.

These housing blocks are built floor by floor, and as soon as some space in them is livable (i.e., the mortar has set and there’s a roof – no running water in the unit or even on site, usually; I see water hauled in by truck to fill the ground floor cistern, which is then tapped as needed to mix cement, to bathe, to brush teeth) workers move in.

In a country with insufficient housing stock and more labor than capital (by a large margin), it makes sense to build this way, of course. It employs people, and having enough work to go around is a challenge in the 7^th most populous country in the world. It helps to redress the housing shortage, which is acute in Dhaka. There simply isn’t the means to buy heavy equipment to put up apartment buildings. The heavy equipment is purchased or leased from Japan or Germany in yen or euro that is lent to the government of Bangladesh from the development agencies of Japan or Germany or the ADB, who then fly in experts to run it. (And if it seems like the yen and euro don’t actually stay here, that’s true – the equipment stays here and the debt stays here, but the money doesn’t – it never arrives.) That equipment will be used to build infrastructure projects, like the new Padma (Ganges) bridge (eventually - it's currently on hold, and now, nationwide, there are no bridges from 100 km north of the capital to the sea). So it’s a cheap way to meet multiple needs.

It’s also dangerous. The scaffolding is bamboo tied with rope (right), and in none of the cases that I’ve seen is there a protective rail or net or, well, anything.

In the picture above, in addition to the typical bamboo scaffolding, you can see two workers on the building in the left background. They don't have more than what amounts to a bamboo ladder, with the rungs half a story apart. You see these everywhere in Dhaka. The guy in the dark shirt is two stories above the tree line so five stories up, doing something to that concrete seam. He and his colleague are both barefoot, and he is simply straddling the outside of the bamboo rigging as he works (bottom right).

It's a high wire act with no admission fee. I was fascinated, and very, very nervous for him until I realized that he was completely chill (and tremendously agile).

It's also revelatory of Dhaka and Bangladesh: it's loosely regulated and less formal; it's poor in capital but rich in labor.

And it's not like there's a ton of choice. It seems to be the best way, given current constraints, to meet the immediate needs of a growing nation.

And I know that even on my longest, hardest, day, I'll never work as hard as these guys. Never.
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Morning Traffic

2012-01-23T19:50:00.000-08:00

The view (and sound) from my window in the morning, and really from 7 AM to 10 PM. The cacophony does subside into the background, and at night it is blissfully quiet until the morning call to prayer.

(And I can't help think: a Republican's dream, really, right? The government that governs least governs best?)

Dinner

2012-01-22T20:31:00.000-08:00

We checked into our home for the next month, a hotel on Green Road (left) in Dhaka’s older downtown area, strategized for the workshop, and decided to get settled in and then meet up for dinner after a bit.

"Settling in” meant, for starters, moving the furniture around to get access to the one plug in the room. Well, there are two plugs, in fairness – one on the lower wall, where it would be expected, that takes a flat, three-pronged plug, and one on the wall near the bathroom door, five feet from the floor, that takes a round two-pronged socket. (The Bangladeshis are very egalitarian about how they get their electricity – there are three different, incompatibly shaped, sockets, and most rooms will have at least two of them. Thankfully, I have adapters for both.) I hung up my dress shirts on the four hangers in the chifforobe (it’s a conservative country and as I’m here for work I packed accordingly), and threw my socks and underwear into a drawer. And I was moved in. My “hotel room” is not what you’re thinking, probably – it’s a smallish, single dorm room with plumbing that will occasionally tease me with hot water, a tile floor, a double bed, and one, well, two, plugs. The bed, when I went to sink into it, resisted. It’s firm, very firm, essentially a futon mattress on a wooden frame – but it’s got two pillows and a duvet. The room is immaculate and all I need. Well, a little insulation around the windows to keep out some of the daytime traffic or the early morning call to prayer from the Mosque would be nice.

I’ve not found the mosque from which these calls are coming, though every morning when I’m awakened I think it’s been set up in my room. It’s loud. I remember as a kid hearing the church bells of Sacred Heart ring the Angelus at six am, noon and six pm, but this is nothing like that – for one thing, we were about a mile from Sacred Heart and the mosque is about a foot, I think. For another, one mosque starts and then a neighboring mosque, perhaps having a different (more relaxed?) sense of time, will begin its call, and so on, for about seven to ten pre-dawn minutes. Perhaps in the countryside it’s a pleasant part of the cadence of life, like Sacred Heart’s bells were in Fowler, but here in Dhaka, well, I hear them. Every morning.

We met in the lobby and Jeff suggested a typical Bangladeshi place, the Aashiana, which he had found on a previous trip to Dhaka where the food was good and the owner was nice. After a ten minute walk, we found it (no small feat!) and walked in to what had the feel of a boisterous political or union rally going on in the main dining room – call and response, spontaneous “Yes!” and “No!” outbursts (in English) . There was an empty table, though, and after a brief look at the menu we let our colleague order family style for the three of us. (What do I know from Bengali food?) Soon the owner, Mohammed, came over, heartily welcomed my colleague back, and invited us all to move to a “special room” a little set apart from the noise.

Mohammed (or “Md.” as it is inevitably abbreviated in the Daily Star, the Bangladeshi paper) is probably 40, and the self-described owner, manager, waiter, and chef though he has a staff of at least ten. The Aashiana is a middle class Bangladeshi restaurant, and he told us he’s doing a good business, keeping busy, and thinking about opening a place in Rangoon, Burma. He is not the last Bangladeshi to talk about Burma and opportunities there, as that country is slowly opening to outsiders, and there will no doubt be “many westerners and foreigners coming there.” He ran back through our order and made a few emendations, including adding a special traditional fish dish “I make special for you,” which was stunning. We also had curry, another fish (the whole fish, head, tail and all) fried and served with eggplant, which was also amazing; a very spicy vegetable dish in sauce; and a chicken which most definitely had never been injected with growth hormones. There were mounds of white rice, of course, but this was served with coriander and fried garlic. It was all delicious.

For dessert, we got a small square ramekin with seeds, sugar crystals and toothpicks. I watched the others (like I had been doing all meal) and in my turn took a few nuggets between my fingers. A little worried about a troublesome tooth but never one to turn down dessert (and yes, I’m aware those might be related), I nibbled gingerly and marveled as the sweet and the spice and the texture mixed on my tongue. It was the perfect ending to my first real Bengali meal.

Throughout the evening Mohammed would step in to speak with us when he had a moment. We asked him about the meeting next door, finally winding up, and we learned it was a marketing seminar (I’m thinking Bangladesh’s answer to Amway); he doesn’t allow political meetings. I’ve only been here four days, but Bangladeshis over 30, unprompted, will heap scorn on their political system and its leaders as being venal, corrupt, and the single largest impediment to their nation’s progress. “How do they get so rich? They don’t do anything,” Mohammed asked. One of my companions suggested that it’s the same in our country, but it’s a matter of degree, of course. It might be true but it rang hollow, and we all felt it.

After we’d paid, he invited the three of us into his office. Mohammed sat behind his desk and talked about how he saw his business. It was clearly a vocation to him, and one he took very seriously. “I am religious man,” he said, then clarifying, “to me, I am a religious man, but what is religion? I don’t need this (motioning to where a beard would be on his clean shaven face) or this (motioning to his uncovered head where a taqiyah would be) to be religious. I have to be right in the eyes of my god and I do that by doing right by the people I serve. If I cheat them or give them bad food, that is wrong, and they wouldn’t have the strength to do their work.” He was deadly earnest. Perhaps the three foreigners crowded close into his small, hot office was an easier audience to speak to, but I’ll never know of course.

He solemnly presented us with business cards, and invited us back. I know I’ll take him up on it.

On my way

2012-01-18T23:43:00.000-08:00

What images come to mind when you hear "Bangladesh"? Anything concrete? A friend from school? Color and movement? Rickshaws? Kissinger's quote calling it a "basketcase"? Just an amorphous sense of poverty, or crowds, or floods?

Some numbers: Bangladesh is the 7th most populous nation in the world, with 154 million people. It has more people than Russia, Japan, Mexico or the Philippines, or more than Germany and the UK combined. These 154 million people live in a country that is slightly smaller than the state of Iowa – imagine, roughly half of the US population in Iowa. The population density is the highest in the world (for a country not a city state like Singapore or Monaco), at nearly 1,000 people/ km2. Eighty percent of national territory is floodplain, nearly all of it less than ten feet above sea level, making it tremendously susceptible to cyclones, storm surges and monsoonal flooding. In 1991 a cyclone hit Bangladesh killing 140,000 people, but that was considered progress as one in 1970, before a warning system or evacuation plans were in place, killed 350,000.

According to a recent article in the NY Times, the poverty rate in Bangladesh has fallen over the last two decades from 59% to 40%. That is a remarkable achievement, but it shows how fan Bangladesh has had to go – that 40% in poverty is the equivalent in human terms of every person in the UK.

That same article lauds Bangladesh for doing so much – 94% of its children are immunized for DPT (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus); infant mortality has fallen sharply – with so little, or half of India’s per capita income. (Bangladesh is twice as poor as India, in case you missed that.)

That is a statistical snapshot of where I’m going for a month. This is not moving to Japan, not even – by a LONG shot – working in Thailand.

It’s a new feeling, being challenged by travel, or more accurately, by a destination. We, or at least “I”, get cavalier about travel and about the size of a shrinking world. I’ve never crossed the Equator or been to Africa or seen anything between, well, Singapore and Venice before this trip (Marco? Polo?), and the places to which I’ve travelled in Europe and Asia are places that are similar in terms of level of development. I have lazily extrapolated the tiny corners I've seen to the map writ large, even though I know better, and I'd forgotten that I can still be genuinely surprised or challenged. I’m nearly always charmed and delighted, but rarely challenged, not in the way that I expect to be over the next month. I've only come to recognize this by stretching for this. That's a lesson I hope I remember, and I'm sure it won't be the only one I get from the next month.

It’s still a big world, and it’s still not flat, despite what Friedman may say. I’m excited and looking forward to making a contribution in some (very) small way, and to facing the challenge of Bangladesh. And challenges give the opportunity for growth.

Two more flights.

Lisbon

2012-01-07T13:29:00.001-08:00

(First appeared in condensed form in print in Soul Edition, Kraven Magazine, Winter 2011)

The plane banked over Spain for the final approach and there was Lisbon - like me, just waking up - near the mouth of the River Tagus. And “mouth” is exactly what the topography looks like from the air: upper and lower jaws, slightly parted where the Tagus flows into the Atlantic. Lisbon is on the north shore of the Tagus estuary, the site of an old port where for centuries Portuguese princes, captains and sailors embarked for voyages of exploration and conquest.

Lisbon, like Paris or Berlin, is a former imperial capital; a seat of government that presided over a vast territory for vast stretches of time – from China to Africa to Brazil to the North Atlantic, from 1488 to 1999. More people speak Portuguese worldwide than Russian, Japanese or French. The technological advances in navigation developed here spurred the Age of Exploration, and led directly to Columbus and other Europeans circling the globe. This imperial legacy shows – you can’t gaze up at the statue of King José I in the grandiose “Praça do Comércio” (right) or down the long, ordered lines of the Praça Marques de Pombal to the riverfront without feeling the grandeur.

Unlike Paris or Berlin, however, Lisbon and the Portuguese seem to have settled comfortably into a post imperial life. Lisbon’s real charms are not primarily tied to its proud past, they are found in its agreeable present of good food, great music, and a European quality of life.

I opted to take a city bus to my hotel in the Saldanha neighborhood, a trip which should only have taken 15 minutes that took 20 because I just couldn’t believe that any international airport could be so reasonably close to the city center, and I missed my stop. (Again, clearly, this was not Paris. I’ll stop mentioning that soon.) Walking through the commuters and observing the morning rush, I was immediately and irrevocably charmed. The architecture! The fountains! The non-rush rush hour! The agreeable pace of life!

I knew little about Lisbon and had done next to no research. I was there on a whim - thanks to a recent break up and a United Airlines fare sale - and I had only bought the ticket two weeks in advance; I really hadn’t planned out an itinerary. That is how I like to see places, in any event, much to the exasperation of nearly everyone with whom I’ve taken trips: a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants approach that I’m sure means I miss some gems. But I’m equally sure it yields unexpected delights, and it suits me. I’m not an ambitious traveler, I remember conversations more than monuments, and atmosphere more than museums, and this pace and style perfectly suits Lisbon. I walked and took trams – slow, rattling, unautomated trams – everywhere through the old city. It was perfect.

My room at the penzion wasn’t ready yet, since it was only 9:30, so I stepped into the Hotel Ibis Lisboa Saldanha for a coffee and ended up having a full breakfast of eggs, toast, yogurt, coffee and juice for €6.50, thus discovering yet another of Lisbon’s charms: it’s affordable. In my experience, a hotel breakfast in most European capitals would have been far less tasty and far more expensive, and yes, I’m looking at you, Paris! And Oslo and London, for that matter. (Last one, I promise!) And consider the hotel for lodging; it was immaculate, the staff was friendly and helpful though I clearly wasn’t a guest, it is in a quiet neighborhood, and it has published rates beginning at €69/night.

Despite my lack of planning, the trusty Lonely Planet Portugal guide that I’d bought just before boarding in Newark had great suggestions, the first of which was the Lisboa Card, a €32 investment made at the airport welcome center, that was good for 72 hours’ free travel on all metro subways, busses, trams, and funiculars. The Lisboa Card also entitled the bearer to discounts – some up to 100% - at many museums, and mine more than paid for itself. With my guide book I’d roughed out three key things to do: day one, walk the city streets and climb up the hill to the Castle of Saint George, in the oldest district in the city; day two, take the train to Belem to see the Manueline architecture of the Monasterio de los Jerónimos; and day three to wander the city on foot and by tram, and to take in its Plazas, restaurants and nightlife.

After a quick nap I headed out, avoiding the closest subway station to walk above ground to see something of the city. Good decision. Lisboetas, on the Friday that I was there, were in no hurry as they played chess or backgammon in the sidewalk cafes. The irregularly shaped, ancient blocks result in irregularly shaped, ancient buildings, at almost every corner. As I walked through the working class neighborhood near the Arroios station (and if that name looks familiar, it’s because the district is built in and above a deep arroyo - pictured left), nearly every block yielded some charming, architecturally improbable sight, in green and orange and pink that seemed just perfect in the soft January light.

My wandering through the Baixa district and up (up!) the Castelo district got me to the Castelo de São Jorge a few hours before its closing. I had enough time for the serious business of the day, looking through the impressive museums on site showing the twenty eight centuries of human history. Looking at a coin from 600 BCE, I couldn’t help but wonder. Who had minted it? What long dead hands had held it? What did it buy? How did it end up buried under castle walls, to be found centuries later? I exited the museum at the perfect time to climb back up to the walls and look west, for stunning views of the sun setting into the Atlantic, far in the distance, beyond the estuary and the city and the river’s mouth.

It was serenely beautiful: the city, with its plazas, six hills, and river lain out below me. Time slowed, then stopped. I looked from the river toward the Atlantic and the horizon, imagining the Phoenician sailors on the Tejo 3000 years before; and the Arabs, who built the walls I was sitting on and who first arrived in 1300 years ago. I looked away from the horizon, closer, first to the other hills and churches, then to just below me, to a house not 30 feet away, where I watched a dog walking in lazy, mildly inquisitive circles in a back garden, under a clothesline, under 900 year old walls.

It seemed perfect. Men had hewn these massive blocks of cooling stone, and had fought bloody battles around them, and the walls and the turrets with the Portuguese flag flying above them were testament to centuries of history and effort and toil. And yet here was a dog and clean clothes and a beautiful sunset. How many dogs had their been, in the those 900 years, under those ramparts? How many loads of laundry had someone washed and hung out? Who had sat before me, on those walls, looking west at the sunset? The compression of time – of eras and centuries – seemed profound. I sat there and took it in.

But time, however compressed, doesn’t stop, so when it was politely indicated to me that the Castle was closing, I walked out through the gate, down the hill, and back into time.

I had heard that Lisbon goes out late so I took a nap and returned to the lobby at 10:30. “Too early,” the desk clerk said, and told me to go get a coffee and dinner, and not to hit the clubs for another hour at the earliest. I wandered through Bairro Alto, just waking up and soon to have people of all persuasions with drinks spilling into the streets. Temporarily and pleasantly lost, I stopped into a tiny corner restaurant across the street from one gay bar and down the block from another, none of which could I find again, unfortunately. I was the only diner - "too early!" - and the two matronly proprietors plied me with rum and port, brought out samples of “real Portuguese cooking” from their mothers’ recipes, and dusted off the English they’d learned to go to Oxford forty years earlier. This was quintessentially Lisbon, I decided – wander in, find more than meets the eye, and be made to feel perfectly at home. As I finished some dinner and drinks and post cards and port and, well sated, prepared to go, I was given a grossly inadequate bill, I grossly over-tipped, and saying out goodbyes they thrust a map of Lisbon’s gayborhood in my hands and bid me well.

I didn’t have an issue with jetlag because I essentially stayed on Lisbon time – dancing ‘til 4 am, sleeping ‘til noon, exploring more of the city on my Lisboa transit card, napping, dining, repeating.

I made it out to Belém, saw the fanciful architecture of the UNESCO sites, and was moved by the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries, left) statue as I watched modern Maersk container ships motor by on a route to China first made possible by the caravels that had sailed 500 years before. As recommended by every guidebook, with good reason, I took Tram 28 from end to end. I met friendly, tolerant, stunningly attractive people, Lisboetas whether via birth or Angola or Brazil or the Portuguese countryside, at every meal and at every club. And I was completely ruined for any future trip to any other European city.

How could they compare?

Some have better food, some have better museums, some have better entertainment, perhaps. But what do you want out of life? What’s your rush? Do you really need to collect the greatest hits of European travel? Slow down. Savor the moment. Lisbon doesn’t sweat the small stuff – it’s seen it all, and learned a thing or two about ambition and what that yields. It is perfectly happy to do a load of laundry, hang it out to dry, and sit in the back garden with a good meal and a happy dog and watch the sun set behind the hills and the river and the west.

Since it was January and I was still in a New Year’s resolution frame of mind, I made one of my own: in the new year, I vowed to be more Portuguese.

Endless summer

2011-07-25T00:43:00.000-07:00

It was a beautiful day on Sunday, so I joined literally hundreds of my fellow San Franciscans in the sun at Dolores Park. I saw a group of kids - early-20-somethings - with a few bottles, an old school boombox, some food, some blankets, a surfeit of time and a seeming dearth of responsibilities, having an unbelievably great time.

I'd seen them when I was at the park the week before - same group, same boombox, same blankets and bags, same summertime mode. I hope every day this summer, every single day they can, they are in the park. And I hope they don't realize how fleeting it is, or that they are innocent in a way they are unlikely to ever be again.

When I was their age, the summer of 1990, I was taking a summer and fall semester off from school to complete an internship and make some money so I could finish, so I had fewer responsibilities than usual. Yeah, I was working two or three jobs - 40 to 60 hours a week divided between Banana Republic, Kinko's and Marquette - but they were part time and ended when I walked out the door. It was easy. And despite all the time spent working, time didn't seem fleeting. The summer months passed by, but those days seemed not to, like they were enervated by the heat, passing as languorously over me as I moved through them.

I lived at 21st and Michigan that summer (the one with the hydrant in front), in the unairconditioned upstairs of an old house that had been chopped into student apartments. My room had "balcony" access - a door to a rickety porch roof (since wisely removed) with a view of the industrial Menomonee River Valley and I-94 - and I would sit out there in my boxers any spare hour I got, reading Pope or Gide or contemporary queer fiction, working on my tan during the day and listening to the neighbors' ska or reggae at night. In the fall my "six straight roommates," as I described them (inaccurately, as it turned out), would be moving in, but that summer it was me and Tim, and he had a day job downtown with regular hours and a girlfriend. Really, it was just me.

I was far enough along in my drinking career that I didn't need to go out every night, since I'd been served at many spots around Milwaukee for a good two years (fake ID address: 10701 S Wood Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60643), but I liked to drink and I went out the two or three nights a week when I could afford it or when I'd get that occasional, random $20 that my mom had snuck into a letter. Bus passes were cheap and I had a bike, so basically all of downtown Milwaukee and the lakefront was my hinterland. If I had to work 3 - 11 at Kinko's or was closing Banana, I'd call friends until I got a hold of one - or didn't - and go to Bradford Beach for an hour or two, watching the volleyball players, if they were out, and then for lunch go for Mexican food and margaritas, and then go to work for eight hours. And maybe after work I'd head up to the East Side and go to the Landmark and shoot darts and play pool til I ran out of quarters or until the 30 bus was about to stop running.

If I worked 7 - 3 at Kinko's or 10-5 at Banana, I'd go the Union or Hegarty's and have lunch (June is National Dairy Month so all sandwiches with cheddar were $2.95), shoot some pool, play Firehouse or Nelson or Skid Row on the jukebox, go home and nap and write a letter and then get ready to go out, listening to the Vogue CD single over and over.

Time didn't matter.

Those days on the beach with Jason, my first boyfriend (and by then my first ex), and his friend Jeff, and Julie and Mike; those nights in the Landmark with Gail and Robert and Marty; those afternoons driving around Milwaukee with Erin; those shifts folding clothes in the back of Banana; those hours on my balcony, smoking, thinking, writing - time was frictionless, and its passing was undetectable. I don't remember if I had a watch, but there were clocks behind every bar, and asking someone for the time was still common. We had to set alarms and be places at designated times, and I had to punch in and out, sometimes as many as eight times a day. I don't mean that we didn't know that time was passing - we did - but its passing had no weight or presence in our lives. Perhaps because it was not - because we didn't realize that it was not - a scarce commodity. We - at least and certainly I - didn't know it was finite. There was just too much of it for me to truly know this.

There were things on the horizon. Eventually, there would need to be a trip to my parents' in Indiana navigated as a newly cognizant queer; there would need to be money saved for rent, for grub, for gas for Julie's Trans Am, for pitchers of beer, for tuition for the spring semester; there would need to be fall travel planned for work; and beyond the horizon there was a mountain of books to be read and understood, and papers written. But as I recall the moments of that endless summer, I don't remember them being touched by any of that. None of that was present, nor did it have any implication for the present. I didn't wake up and find it was over - I woke up and it was still summer, still me on that single bed in a blazing hot room in Milwaukee. Still pool to be played and shirts to be ironed and music to be listened to. Still a full day of heat and sunlight and work and friends stretching out in front of me. Still a new queer identity to investigate and to stretch out in front of me.

I'd wake up on that narrow bed in that narrow room, lean across to my boombox, and press play - Depeche Mode's "Violator" was probably already loaded and programmed (tracks 1, 2, 3, 6, 7) - and just listen to music, lying under that one sheet, watching the light edge across the cieling, oblivious to the passage of time, nor remotely cognizant of how stunningly luxurious that was. Or at night I'd sit on the balcony and play "Listen Without Prejudice" (tracks 1, 2, 6, 8, 9) on repeat, as I wrote letters to friends from high school, coming out to them ("Freedom '90", especially, was written for coming out: "I think there's something you should know/ I think it's time I told you so / There's someone deep inside of me / There's someone else I've got to be..."), taking all the time I needed to get it right, because I had all the time I needed.

I hope those kids at the park have an endless summer like I had. I hope their soundtrack means as much to them, and I hope they have the time to just lay in bed and listen to it. I hope their moments with their friends and exes and coworkers glide frictionless through their days, not snagging on the present or the demands of their futures.

And I hope they don't know it. The consciousness that you will never again be this unburdened, or this young, or perhaps this handsome or innocent or carefree, is one way to look at a loss of innocence: cognizance destroys it. I know I was innocent, that time was languorous and frictionless, but I didn't know it then. That was part of its gift.

I hope they have it, and that they don't know it. Not until their autumn, whenever that may come to them.
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Coming soon - the new state of South California?

2011-07-21T14:59:00.001-07:00

Oh, please, let this come to pass.

In case you missed it, which is likely, since it didn't get too much play outside of the LA Times coverage, some conservatives in inland SoCal have HAD it, just HAD IT with how they are being neglected by the "big, broken" state government in Sacramento.

A Riverside County Supervisor, Jeff Stone, has proposed that fourteen counties in the southern part of the state of California secede from the rest of the Golden State and form their own, to be named, tentatively, "South California." The fourteen counties that he's selected stretch from near Lake Tahoe to Mexico, and would create a state of 13 million people (which would make it #5 in population, just between New York and Florida) and 73,583 square miles (which would make it #17 in size, between South Dakota and North Dakota).

Formidable, no?

It's no accident that Mr. Stone has selected primarily (though not exclusively) Republican Counties.

This new state would take with it the following State Senate districts (current party): 14 (R), 16 (R), 18 (R), 31 (R), 32 (D), 33 (R), 34 (D), 35 (R), 36 (R), 37 (R), 38 (D), 39 (D), 40 (R).
That's 9 republican California State Senators that would be gone from Sacramento, with a loss of only 4 Democrats.

The current California Senate has a 25 - 15 Democratic majority, so were this change to occur, it would become a 21 - 6 Democratic Majority.

And at the risk of being uber wonky, this new state would take with it all or most of the following California Assembly seats: 25, 29, 30, 31, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80. Like to guess the make up of these 24 seats by party, anyone? Republicans have 17, and Democrats have 7.

The current makeup of the California Assembly is 52 Democrats and 27 Republicans. Were this new state to be made, the ratio would be 45-10.

I can't help but see the irony that a Republican from a conservative part of my beloved California is railing about how dysfunctional the state government in Sacramento is.

The Republicans are the ones who have made it dysfunctional. Why can't we pass a budget? Because of the (nearly) unique-to-California requirement that any tax increase needs a 2/3rds majority in the state legislature. Fifty percent, which the Democrats always have isn't enough. Republicans can - and do, regularly, with comparatively very little popular support statewide - completely tie up the state by voting in a block to prevent any revenue increases, and then point the finger and say "Sacramento can't get anything done!"

Well, think of what we could get done if they left: pass revenue increases? Check. Fully fund the University of California system? Check. (We'd only be losing UC Merced and UC San Diego - a loss, true, but it's worth it!) Fully fund the California State University system? Check. (We'd lose a few more campuses here, like San Diego State, Cal State Fullerton, and Fresno State, but again, worth it!) Fully fund K-12 education? Check.

We would have the most progressive state government in the US. Vermont, eat our dust! Gay marriage, here we come!

What about in presidential politics? Those electoral votes would be in play. Most of those counties voted for President Obama in 2008, and while a Democrat couldn't count on them every election, they would be reasonably in play. It's winnable.

I don't see any downsides. Huge Dem majorities in the California State Assembly and Senate? That's a win. More progressive voters statewide for Proposition issues like, oh, let's say Prop 8? That's a win. Even the potential of repealing Prop 13? That's a win.

And down the road twenty years or so, as demographic trends assert themselves and all of our former state-mates who fear the tide of illegal immigration and so left the former California to be in a white majority "South California" find themselves living in a Latino-majority state, even as they rail against them, the inevitable will happen: we'll even get two more (likely) Latino Democrats in the Senate in Washington, DC. And that's a win.

What's the downside? (Tuneless whistling...) I don't see one.

So please, let's all get behind Mr. Stone and his desire to carve out a new state. After all, you don't see many Virginians missing West Virginia these days, do you?
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War as Spectator Sport

2011-05-02T23:21:00.000-07:00

On a long flight last year, while I was waiting in line for the bathroom, I saw a kid looking at the door, puzzled. It took me a second, but I realized that he didn’t know how to tell if it was vacant, or how to open it. He’d never been on a plane. He had a baby face and despite standing my height he couldn’t have been more than 19. I showed him, let him go first, and when he came out I thanked him for his service. This impossibly young kid, in full fatigues and buzz cut, was going to fight a war around the world from wherever home was, and he’d never before been on a plane.

What have we been asked to do for these wars? What have you done for these wars? I’ve personally done nothing that could in any way be called a sacrifice. President Bush didn’t ask us to pay for them, instead dropping taxes during a war for the first time in American history. President Obama has ramped up a second war and is testing the waters of a third, with no broad tax plan to pay for them, no conscription, no request for shared sacrifice. The boys and girls and men and women who are fighting these wars for us are doing so in a vacuum, away from what most of America sees or experiences.

When I watch sports, I see incredibly talented young men do things I could never do. They are not from the same places I am; they don’t hang out in the circles I do; I’m not likely to meet them at my local pub, or see them on the train or bus. They do things that are so rarefied in terms of skill, discipline and dedication that it is nearly unreal. I have almost nothing in common with them. I love to watch them pursue excellence, and I usually choose not to think about the corrosive effect that pursuit might have on the universities or communities that subsidize these spectacles. When my teams win, I run out into the streets in a shared, communal experience with others, celebrating the things these exceptional young men have done, and chant “we’re #1” despite the fact that “we” is a fiction.

I was profoundly disturbed when I saw the coverage of my fellow Americans dancing in the streets last night, on the news of Osama bin Laden’s execution, like we’d just beaten the Soviets in the Olympics.

At first I couldn’t figure out why I was disturbed.

Because it’s unseemly? Yes, of course it is. Civilized people do not dance and chant when someone is killed, it’s barbaric, intemperate and base. But might that be just subjective?

As I thought more, I realized that people were celebrating what can only be considered in fact a sad event. Death is never cause for celebration except perhaps for someone who is aged, has lived a good life, and is ready.

It is not the case, in my opinion, that the state never has the right to take a life.

It is not the case, in my opinion, that military action is never justified.

It is not the case, in my opinion, that a greater good can never demand the ultimate forfeit.

We live in a world populated by religion-addled people, people who are immune to rationality, who are drunk on power, who are sated only by blood, who are evil as shown by the depravity of their actions.

I believe that someone who revels in death, who fantasizes about the deaths of millions and evinces the deaths of tens of thousands, who through lies and demagoguery and fear and faith motivates families to send 12 year old girls to death and to murder, who has stated a claim to continue to pursue death for all who don’t share his views – that for such a person execution is justice.

But when that justice is served, it is not cause for celebration. We cannot celebrate an execution, ever, and claim that we respect life. We cannot, on one hand, hold the truth of the primacy of the individual to be self evident, and then act like we won the state championship when the ultimate demand is required and the sentence is served. By chanting in the streets upon achieving a military objective – one that was just, yes, but odious to execute, and one whose ultimate demand was unspeakable murder – we reduce a most somber duty to intemperate chauvinism and frivolity.

Why?

Those incredibly skilled and disciplined young men and women who fight our wars are publicly lionized by all sides; they fight in our name; we are not asked to contribute in any real, present way in terms of sacrifice for their success; and “we’re #1” when they win. Maybe for the (mostly, from what I saw) kids in the streets last night it has the same sense of remoteness? Maybe because the milieu are segregated in which many university kids and many military kids live, so it is easier to be cavalier about what “they”, our warriors, do in our behalf, precisely in the same manner that spectators are cavalier about what athletes do? Maybe if there were conscription, or the threat of conscription, or if there were higher taxes, or a mandatory period of national service (as in Israel, Germany, Singapore) then we would all know someone who knew how to fly those helicopters, or a brother or sister would know how to shoulder those guns, or perhaps we would learn the heavy burden of a duty that requires us to look at another human being through a scope, and pull a trigger.

On V-E Day, there were exuberant celebrations in the streets of nearly every American city. We had defeated an implacable, evil, fascistic enemy in Nazi Germany, and four long years of sacrifice, rationing, lost loved ones, and daily, visceral knowledge of war and its costs were nearing an end. There was a justifiable sense of relief, of common cause, courage, fortitude, stamina and sacrifice. Some had paid the ultimate sacrifice, of course, in the cause of justice, but as a people Americans shared in the enterprise. “We” had done it.

There is no question, in my mind, that the world is a better place without Osama bin Laden. I do believe justice has been served, in this case. But “we” didn’t do it.

It’s not a hockey match. That implies a next season, and a score, and therefore a score to settle.

War is not a hockey match, and it ought not have been celebrated like one.
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Innocence Abroad

2011-02-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

During the spring break of my senior year, my Ma told me that I shouldn't make too many summer plans since I'd likely have to work to make my book and spending money for college in the fall. I resigned myself to another summer of detassling. A month later, she handed me a plane ticket to Frankfurt, West Germany - I had been given the trip as a gift, she told me, and I wasn't to ask too many questions about its provenance. (I still don't know who paid for it. When I got home I was asked to write a nice thank you note and she'd see it delivered.)

Needless to say, I was over the moon. West Germany, for six weeks!? I couldn't even imagine it.

The world was much, much bigger in 1987 than it is now. International calls were expensive, rare, and of poor quality. You saved them for Christmas, and you learned to pause after you spoke so the party on the other line could hear and respond: there was a three or four second delay, and if you weren't careful you would end up speaking over each other, which I learned the hard way on the annual call to my brother Ray when he was stationed overseas in the Army. There was no Skype or internet, of course - if you wanted to communicate with someone in a foreign country, you sat down and wrote a letter, long hand, on onion skin paper, and put it into an airmail envelope, and mailed it with a stamp. If you were lucky, it would arrive in two weeks.

Come to think of it, that's how you communicated with people in other parts of the U.S., too - domestic calls were expensive, and people still wrote letters to communicate. I couldn't call my eldest sister who was away for college in Texas - I would get in trouble if I did when the phone bill came. If I wanted to tell her something, I had to get a pencil and paper and sit down and write it out. Same with my brothers in the seminary in Wisconsin, or even with grandma and grampa.

All flights were expensive - very expensive - but international travel in particular was well out of our reach. Going to another country was so rare that I remember a trip to Canada when I was in fourth grade - we'd driven to see my brother Chris in Detroit, and we drove across the river on the Ambassador Bridge and back through the Detroit Windsor Tunnel. I was thrilled. It was rare enough that us three little kids got our picture taken under a sign with a Canadian flag that read: "Tunnel to USA" as proof.

Travel to Europe was Halley's Comet rare - my dad had taken a trip to the UK for work eight years prior, and when he came home we all sat in the living room as he told stories about the long flight, seeing churches and castles older than our entire nation's history, walking Hadrian's Wall. I was completely mesmerized. Even as an 8 year old, I couldn't quite fathom being able to touch something made by Roman hands. Fort Ouiatenon was the oldest European history (and thus what I counted as "mine" at the time) that I had been exposed to, and that I felt almost viscerally, but this! He had a stopover in Shannon, Ireland, on the way home and bought me a set of three porcelain leprechauns with "Made in Ireland" stamped on the bottom. I treasured them as exotic and kept them on my table by my bed.

And now I was going to West Germany? I couldn't believe it! I was to stay with the family of a girl who had stayed with us the summer before, in Oldenburg, Niedersachsen, a lovely old city in the north. It could have been the German answer to Akron and I wouldn't have cared, but it wasn't. It had a charming pedestrian zone in its center, a great old castle, and we rode bicycles everywhere (and I mean everywhere - to school, to the grocery store, even to church, all of us, the whole family, on bikes, to church in our church clothes! I was - well, not shocked, but definitely surprised and charmed).

No internet, no skype, no Google, no Wikipedia - just as you couldn't call someone around the world, you couldn't, from your bedroom or home, look at pictures of Oldenburg, Niedersachsen, West Germany. You could look in an encyclopedia, or in your library's travel section about Germany, but that was it. When I say that it was terra incognita, that was truer then than is possible for any part of earth can be anymore. Try it - Google East Timor or Majuro or Malawi and you'll get pictures, phone numbers, maps, and dining recommendations in under a second. I may have been 18, but I was not much different than the Americans that Mark Twain had lampooned a century before.

What opportunities are there for that kind of exploration now? I'm not sure they exist. When you don't speak the language and are standing outside the closed station in Donauwoerth, Bavaria, having got off the last train of the evening, and you don't know where the youth hostel is and there's no one around, well, you need to be a little resourceful. No cell phone. No internet. You learn to work it out, that it will work out, that even when it doesn't work out it will still work out, if in no other way than in the great stories you get along the way.

At different points in my life, people have told me that they thought I was intrepid - like when I passed up a promotion to teach English in Japan, knowing nothing at all about the country; or even when I went to Lisbon by myself, on a whim, for a long weekend. I'm not sure that's true, but if that is a part of my character, I have to give credit to the generosity of an unknown benefactor, to trusting parents, and to a great host family. Credit, and thanks.

Liberty

2011-02-18T17:29:00.000-08:00

One July morning in 1987, I was seated at a kitchen table in Niedersachsen, Germany, listening to rapid Plattdeutsch.

I was used to not understanding speech in the house, or only snippets, as I was staying with a German host family and my one summer of German was wholly inadequate to the task, but there was something urgent being discussed.

"Hast du diene backpack?" I was asked.

"Ja, eine moment bitte," and I got it.

My very kind host father with the ready smile went into his office and emerged with four plain white envelopes, his smile strained. His wife eased from my bulging bag the lunch they had packed me, took out the hard boiled eggs she had kindly prepared for me that morning, unwrapped them from the morning's newspaper, and handed them to her husband who re-wrapped them in the plain white envelopes.

They saw me looking at them, and in response to what must have been a quizzical expression Frau H. said simply. "Morgenzeitung (morning paper). You go Berlin. Verboten." And she shook her head.

I was stunned. I was leaving that day for Berlin, the first stop on my solo, eight day train trek, and I of course had to go through East Germany to get there. I would see East German soldiers. I would be in a communist country. There was no freedom of the press, and thus the morning Oldenburg newspaper was contraband. I sat up and started to pay closer attention, and to think about what I was doing - what had been a lark was now serious; what I had learned about totalitarianism through books and news media an ocean away I was now going to see through the glass of a train window, up close and personal.

My host father had business in Hanover that day, or so he said - I suspect it was drummed up so he could point me in the right direction and make sure my ticket was all sorted - and he rode with me and we spoke, as much as we could, about politics and weather and crops and history, and I was very glad for his company. My mind was reeling, though, and I wasn't real focused. What else was contraband? I was a very religious adolescent but I didn't carry a Bible or prayer book or even a rosary, so I was okay there. My journal? I wrote a ton, and scribbling in English could be anything to an East German guard. What about cash? I had deutschmark and dollars, but barely enough for my own purposes, not enough to foment revolution. But how much was too much?

I bid "tschuss" to Herr H. in Hanover and boarded my train east. I saw on the timetable that this particular train started in Paris and ended in Warsaw, which I felt bound it, and me, to history. Just east of Braunschweig we slowed to a crawl as we crossed the border into East Germany through barbed wire, yards of precisely groomed sand and open space, and square towers three stories tall with 360' of reflective glass on top. (When years later I read about a panopticon, I recalled those towers.)

I stared so hard my eyes hurt for the next few hours, watching the grey countryside, the unknown car makes, the small fields, the belching industrial megaliths and the occasional pock-marked building - pock marked by gunfire from WWII 42 years earlier, I realized with a shock - roll by. I looked in particular for people but saw very few, and certainly none very close to the tracks. In Magdeburg, East German soldiers boarded the stopped train and three went to each compartment, checking passports, while others stood at arms, backs to the train, coiled muscle and nerve.

I had my new passport at the ready, and after what seemed like 10 minutes of staring at my one entrance stamp, the soldier handed it back to me, unsmiling, and moved to the next car. No one searched my bag. I wasn't going to be pulled off the train and into a small room and asked questions. But everything radiated control, and a lack of liberty, of movement, of behavior, of speech.

There is a difference between knowing that not everyone in the world could get in a car and drive across a continent, and seeing the barbed wire and minefields and guard towers to prevent them from trying. Between knowing that not everyone could read whatever the hell they wanted, and wrapping hard boiled eggs in envelopes instead of newsprint so as not to appear to be smuggling illicit media. Between knowing that not everyone could board a passenger train that stopped in their city, and seeing, ten feet away out of a train window, soldiers with guns drawn who had orders to shoot them if they tried.

It was a lesson in liberty; the liberties that I had - liberties I scarcely understood and had taken completely for granted, at 18 - and those that others, even in Europe, did not.

When I got to West Berlin I checked in to my hostel and immediately went to the Wall. It ran through neighborhoods and was copiously graffitied, colorful, ugly, and omnipresent like a whine in your ear that you can't quite shut out: less or more intrusive, but always there. I developed an entirely unoriginal theory during my two days in Berlin: Berliners were all a little bit mad. More than anyone else in the world in those Cold War days, they lived in the mouth of a gun; their tomorrow might never come, so why not eat, drink and be merry?

I watched West Berliners in the parks and neighborhoods that abut the Wall ignore it, uniformly, and literally turn their backs to it. When I crossed into East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie, I walked from a color film into one that was black and white. Buildings were pocked by Nazi and Soviet bullets from 45 years earlier and nothing was new or colorful. After the anarchy and madness and vibrancy of West Berlin, it was disorienting. I walked miles around the city, getting as close to the wall as I could in residential neighborhoods, and here in the East it was just ugly: monochromatic, menacing, ugly. I saw it for what it was - not as a symbol of the Cold War, not as metaphor, but as an instrument of state power, and state control. If I ran towards it, I could get arrested. If I tried to climb it, I would get shot.

The grandeur of the Brandenburg Gate, with its fascistic fronting lines and spaces, the better through which to see, with its adorning statue's back to Bonn, Europe, and the West, and face to the east, to Poland and Moscow.

Two years after that trip, when the Berlin Wall fell and totalitarian regimes across Eastern Europe collapsed, and I saw people my age dancing on the ruins of it, I knew I was witnessing history. I couldn't get enough of the shots on the news: East Berlin, and then Prague and Warsaw and Budapest and Bratislava and Sofia and Bucharest, became free. Totalitarian regimes collapsed. Fascism, under whatever name it took, was faltering. Millions of people across Eastern Europe could read whatever the hell they wanted, and go where they wanted. If people in Magdeburg now wanted to board a train, they would no longer be shot.

Many people have been making comparisons this week between Cairo, 2011, and Berlin, 1989; or speculating how far the comparisons should go. I was reminded of seeing what liberty was and wasn't. How what a state said - East Berlin was capital of the Deutsche Democratische Republik, after all - and what it did could be so blatantly at odds. How the will of the governed could be subverted by force, overt and opaque.

Watching the events in Tunis and Cairo come to their joyous conclusions, I was thrilled again. I have no ties to Egypt like I had to a sundered Germany, no ethnic bonds or study, and the tyranny under which Egyptians lived was perhaps not the same as that of the East Germans in 1987, but the truth of the matter speaks in eloquence beyond words. I was deeply moved as courageous people came together in Tahrir Square and demanded their liberty. There are not too many times in human history when the world has seen such a thing, and I've seen it twice now.

It's a long road ahead for the Egyptians and Tunisians and Iranians and Bahrainis (and, and, and...) And while the Belarussians might have some thoughts on that, so do the Poles, and the Latvians, and the Czechs. More liberty is better, more people living under more liberty is better.
I am proud to have been reminded of the freedoms I have by the people in Cairo. I'd love to learn the lesson again from Tripoli or Tehran.
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Missed story of the week? Ivory Coast

2011-02-17T21:40:00.001-08:00

Yes, across the northern rim of Africa there is unprecedented news and activity this week, but in western Africa there is news, too, and an opportunity for the United States.

In Côte d'Ivoire, a strongman was voted out of office and he's not leaving. Laurent Gbagbo, the losing president in question, is clinging to power despite calls from his neighbors in the region to step down, despite offers of asylum in other west African nations, despite (nearly - keep reading) no one believing any of his manufactured claims about legitimacy, or getting the most votes, or needing to stay for law and order.

The most recent development, as reported in Le Monde this morning Paris time (article in French), is that M. Gbagbo has seized two French banks and frozen their assets in order to have the funds needed to pay the military and police on whom his support is based.

No money to pay the soldiers, no more régime for M. Gbagbo. And what is paying his soldiers to do? Murder people who voted for his rival, M. Alassane Ouattara. Ouattara happens to be from the northern part of the country, and is, like most people in the north, Muslim. Many of Ouattara's voters (though by no means all) are Muslim. The people turning up dead in morgues and in mass graves around the country? Muslim. M. Gbagbo's religion? He is reported to be "a devout Evangelical Christian." (And Pat Robertson's CBN has come out in support of him. No, I'm not kidding. Original CBN interview here.)

If you have a strong stomach, you can read what the good Christian has ordered his thugs to do in an article I first read in the Chronicle.

Why this religious regional division? It is a legacy of colonialism. When the Europeans left western Africa, they left nations whose borders were drawn by bureaucrats in London and Paris to facilitate maximum economic exploitation of the region with no regard to local tribal alignments, languages or religions. They make no sense. If you were to draw a line on the map roughly from Freetown, Sierra Leone, on the west to, well, the Nile River, really, you'd have largely Muslims to the north, and largely non-Muslims (Christians, animists) to the south. This line nearly bisects Nigeria, Central African Republic, Benin, Togo, Ghana and yes, Côte d'Ivoire. Add this careless border drawing and the resulting competition of regions, religions and clans for resources and power within nation states to the bloody ills to the European legacy of intrusion into Africa.

So, where is the opportunity for the US here?

Our stated ideals - in this case, democracy and the legal transition of power - absolutely benefit Muslims and all Ivoirians, and would be an example for us to point to where we are actually doing what we said we would. It would also be in our strategic interests - tertiary, fine, but still -for a stable democratic state to develop along Ghana's western border, where Mr. Obama visited not long ago. If the state were not a strong man ruled cleptocracy and were at all reasonably governed, the standard of living would increase, and perhaps Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire could be regional incubators for stability, prosperity and democracy.

Applying significant diplomatic pressure to ease out M. Mbagbo and allow M. Ouattara to assume his rightful role as president is a low risk, moderate reward move for the Obama administration.

Take a look at the headlines, and then a map. They - and we - could use one about now.

Road Trip

2011-02-01T20:33:00.000-08:00

It's taken as an article of faith in my family that Brennans love road trips. All of my siblings, though my brothers in particular, have elaborate stories about epic trips when they + another brother/ friend/ hitchhiker went from Tierra del Fuego to Barrow in an AMC Rambler in 27 hours, or something similar, and how much fun they had doing it. I am not immune: One evening, after wrapping up business in Cincinnati, I drove to visit a sister-in-law who was laid up during a difficult pregnancy. When I walked into her Knoxville hospital room, surprising her, she asked "What in the world are you doing here?" I answered "Well, I was in the neighborhood..." She loved that line, but to my mind there was truth to it - Cincy is a lot closer to Knoxville than Chicago, so why not? I have an atlas on which I've highlighted every road I've ever driven in the US, and I will look at it before I take a trip and drive new roads, just to have more to highlight, more to see, more memories to seal away. I've had some epic hitchhiker experiences as well - from Denver to LA, from Sacto to Tahoe, across Nevada, in Hawai'i, outside Arcata - and I've always loved throwing a bag in the car and heading out.

Why is this, this centrality of road trips in our shared family lore and individual pride and myth-making? We all cut our teeth on the same road trips growing up, after all. We spent the same number of interminable hours on sticky vinyl seats, with no air conditioning, fighting or avoiding fighting with siblings, being sick or avoiding the physical manifestations of sickness of siblings, shoving siblings' things out the window, all while our - well, what else can be said? - heat-crazed, exhausted, clearly enmaddened parents drove us across four states to get to a campsite, and all while they yelled at us to "Wake up!" or "Put that book down!" so we could "Look at the scenery!" or "All pray the rosary!" Given this background, it's a mystery that as soon as we all had the resources to buy, beg, or borrow (or rent, in my case) a car, we all, without fail, grabbed a sibling or a friend or a hitcher and an atlas and went on a road trip. But we did. (Stockholm syndrome, maybe?)

My first childhood memory of a family vehicle is the Tan Van. It was a Dodge Tradesman Maxivan, or what some friends have since called the church bus, with two bucket seats up front, an engine that protruded in between them, three bench seats, and an extended storage area in the back. (Driver's view right, exactly our model; another picture here, with rust in all the right places.) Each bench seat could accommodate three seated people, which is nine, plus Mom and Dad in the front bucket seats, which is eleven, which leaves... me, to sit on the engine, facing backward.

It wasn't the safest perch in the van. Had there been an accident, I would have been thrown into the windshield at such an angle that my head would have been forced into my sternum, snapping my neck instantly, before the glass shattered and spewed me out of the van into whatever it was that had just been hit - but it was the 70's and no one had accidents, the tan van wasn't really focused on safety, and no one had seat belts.

I don't mean that metaphorically - literally, no one in that vehicle had seat belts. Our Tan Van had rusted out so badly that you could see the road rushing past underneath you if you'd lay down and look for it, which I did. Finally it got to the point where my dad and older brothers felt compelled to saw a piece of 3/4" plywood the right dimensions (cutting out the space for the two back wheels) to bolt onto the van floor so no one and no seats would fall through. They drilled holes in the plywood so we could bolt the bench seats back in, but no one was drilling holes for the seat belt posts. They got left behind in the modification.

The plywood floor was an improvement on the rusted metal floor that had been there before on a safety level, sure, but I never remember feeling unsafe in that van, ever. The main advantage of plywood over rusted metal? It was quieter. The previous floor, such as it had been, was deteriorating sheet metal. Know the sound of rain on a tin roof? Or the sound of a rock being thrown by a lawnmower into the side of a car? Imagine that incessantly, at highway speed, while you are lying on the metal in question. Throw in the whine of the tires, and you're there. That old floor had transferred every rock kicked up by a tire, every pothole not avoided, every drift onto a gravel shoulder into sound energy. We slept on the floor, on blankets, and we heard and felt it all. Despite that, we slept so soundly that when we'd arrive back in Fowler we'd have to be carried up the steps and into bed, so maybe it all became white noise after a while, but the difference when that plywood went in was pretty remarkable.

At night Mom or Dad drove and the other rode shotgun; then older kids on benches, then younger kids on the floor. Given that math, any more than three kids in the van and I slept on the floor. The floor of a van, going between fifty and seventy miles an hour, on mostly two lane roads from Fowler, Indiana, to Raymond, Illinois, to Springfield, Illinois, and then back to Fowler, with a bigger sibling immediately above me stretched out asleep on a vinyl bench seat, unbelted and unrestrained in any way.

God, I miss the 70's.

Sometimes we'd do the whole circle route in one day - leave Fowler at 6 am, get to Grandma and Grandpa M's in Raymond, Illinois, at 10:30 or so, stay for lunch, drive to Springfield to see Dad's relatives, possibly stay for dinner, and drive home, leaving at 8:00 at night for the four hour drive back.

My parents - they had to have been just nuts, they had to have been, but at least on those trips to Illinois we were visiting relatives, so they had a putative objective.

For our summer vacations, there wasn't even that. It couldn't have been the traditional objective of a vacation: how could that taking two weeks, loading us all up into the van, and driving to Michigan, or Philadelphia in 1976 to see the Liberty Bell, or Dallas, Texas, in the middle of summer after the eldest moved there for school, god help us, I think I'm still hot from those drives, have been a vacation? And it's not like the Tan Van was worry free driving, as you can probably tell. One Dallas summer trip, the axle broke in Sikeston, Missouri - on hour six of a fifteen hour drive. (I clearly remember it was Sikeston, because there was a road sign that had the US highway shields for routes 60, 61 and 62 together on one post. I was thrilled!) We sat in a city park, all of us who were on that trip (and I don't remember numbers, but I remember there were a lot of us, and I remember it was damn hot), waiting while it got fixed. That can't have improved our mood, and there were nine hours to go, packed into that van, sticking to those seats, fighting with those siblings.

Can you imagine doing that, now? No DVD players, no headphones, no video game controllers of any sort - only AM radio, books and the rosary. We would play car games to pass the time, and talk to each other in between the fighting, and see the country roll by us. From my perch on the engine, sitting on a folded up blanket in the summer to protect my butt from the heat, I got to see things I'd read about flow out behind me. I saw the Mississippi River, and the Gateway Arch, and whole interstate highways cut through mountains - well, rock, anyway - in southern Missouri, and rice and cotton fields in Arkansas and Texas - fields with standing water, fields with crops you couldn't eat - all things that made me realize that the way things were done in Benton County wasn't the only way to do things.

It was my introduction to travel as education - formally, as I would take the encyclopedias of the states we passed through so I could teach myself their crops and cities and state trees, birds, and flowers, and as I would stare at the atlas for each state for hours, memorizing the roads and the numbers and the counties we'd drive through. I won't say that this initiated my lifelong love of maps and geography, because I don't remember a time I couldn't stare at maps for hours, but it certainly cemented it. Less formally as I would be read to by my sisters, and by my father when it was mom's turn at the wheel. He'd cycle through the Little House on the Prairie books, and when we got to "The Long Winter," regardless of time of year, we'd have to bundle up in blankets if we wanted him to go on - he wouldn't if we didn't, it was the ritual. My brothers would tell me stories about people they knew, from Chicago or Detroit or Minnesota; they'd tell me things they'd learned in school, they'd talk about music, or their worldviews, or family stories which, even then, involved cars.

After all I guess they were fun, those trips. I never realized the generosity that my exhausted and harried parents demonstrated by taking us on them - to connect with cousins and grandparents, to learn something about the history and geography of our country, to give us shared experiences as a family were all great lessons and great experiences. It was cheap entertainment, on one level, as gas was 29 cents a gallon, campgrounds didn't charge us much, and we bought food in a grocery store and made sandwiches and lemonade at city parks along the way.

Whether we were driving to Watseka, Illinois, for Dairy Queen on a hot summer's night, or to Lincoln, Illinois, for a family funeral when it was so cold our great aunt couldn't be interred because the soil was too frozen to dig and the heater in the tan van didn't stand a chance of keeping us warm, we were having the shared experiences that comprised our youth.

Maybe that's what the road trip experience has come to mean for those of us in my family - some nostalgia-suffused combination of freedom, the wonder of new experience, and familial bond that we have tried to recapture. But maybe that's just my view, why I love them and what I have tried to recreate. Maybe that's what I'm hoping for when I'm driving west on US 56 outside of Clayton, New Mexico, watching the sunset behind the Rockies; or when I'm waking up in a rented Chevy Cavalier on a cold, foggy morning in Port Angeles, Washington.

Maybe I'm just hoping to see it forward this time, as an adult, instead of sitting on the engine, looking down at the map, choosing a path, and then looking up to see it roll away behind me, backward, gone before I saw it.
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Losing battle

2011-01-31T23:37:00.000-08:00

The reason that some Conservatives and Evangelical Christians (and Venn diagrammatically, there is near perfect overlap there) are so biliously against gay marriage to the point that they want a Constitutional Amendment outlawing it is, I suspect, because Constitutional Amendments are so hard to undue. That would be the only way to give a ban staying power; they can read headlines and polls and tables as well as I can, and they know they have lost.

Evidence? Headline in tomorrow's NYTimes: "Bush's Daughter Backs Gay Marriage."

This would be W's daughter, the same W. whose wife (as quoted in the article and elsewhere) has said that people in committed loving relationships ought to have the same rights as others. Who else thinks the queers marrying is a pretty good idea in a secular, modern democracy that values fairness and equality? Meghan McCain, Senator McCain's daughter.

And there are many, many, more.

More than 50% of people 18 and over in eight states have given explicit support to gay marriage (in a 2008 poll and study, here). More than 50% of Americans between 18 and 29, in every state in the Union that didn't secede for the right to own black people (plus, it kinda goes without saying, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Utah).

In every state except the hopeless ones, over 50% of people aged 18-29 gave explicit support for gay marriage in a 2008 poll.

So the Evangelical Right knows they've lost. It's not over, by any stretch. First, their voters vote at much higher rates than the 18-29 year olds. And they care more, way more, in the negative than many younger voters in the positive on this issue. And the Evangelical Christians will spend millions of dollars fighting it, and telling lies about what kids are going to have to learn in public schools, and how men will be able to marry their pets if gay marriage passes - but they've lost.

Millions of Americans, like Ms. Bush, have gone to school with out, happy queer folk, have worked with us, have been treated and taught and entertained by us, and these millions of hetero Americans can't imagine that we shouldn't have the same rights that they have.

It's not arguments showing the role of the 14th Amendment, or on the relevance of Brown vs. Board of Education and separate not being equal, for these Americans - it's a decent, human reaction to increased knowledge and familiarity, it's their friends and neighbors, it's reaping the years of all of the coming out. It's the new normal.

From the same study:

"I also think it’s interesting that, even in states that we normally consider quite hostile to gay rights (the ones at the bottom of the table), there is still a significant age difference: 18-29 year-olds in Alabama, for example, are more supportive of gay marriage than people 65 and older in Massachusetts."

It will take years and a lot of money, and I know I'm not writing anything that many others haven't already said, and said better, but the religious right has lost on this issue. The queers are gonna get married. Even in the hopeless states.

Welcome aboard, Ms. Bush.
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Headline: "Halliburton knew..."

2010-10-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

Do you really need to hear the rest? I bet you don't. Can you guess? I bet you can.

It's not surprising that an entity designed to do one thing, make money, does everything it can do to achieve that one aim. I'm not surprised when fish swim, when pitchers pitch, or when bloviating blow hards get on the radio and bloviate, hard.

What is surprising is how many Americans seem to think that these entities designed with only one goal in mind, to make money, should not be looked after, that there should be no limit to what they can do or to whom they can do it, that oversight is evil ("socialist", same thing) and that the public good isn't worth protecting.

It's not surprising, it's just staggering. Unfathomable. Irrational. Why do some Americans, who are troubled, economically insecure and making less for more productivity than at any time since the 1970's (yes, that's right - the 1970's were far better for most Americans than the 80s and 90s were) think that putting government back in the hands of those who think business does just fine on its own, thanks, is the way to go? How can that be the answer? What kind of logic - or at least thinking, since it doesn't seem to be logical - leads a person to that conclusion?

So Halliburton, about as solid an example of a poor market actor as I could find, "...knew of cement flaws before spill..." and didn't act on the knowledge. Why is the cement important? From the NY Times article:

The failure of the cement set off a complex and ultimately deadly cascade of events as oil and gas exploded upward from the 18,000-foot-deep well. The blowout preventer, which sits on the ocean floor atop the well and is supposed to contain a well bore blowout, also failed.

In an internal investigation, BP identified the faulty cement job as one of the main factors contributing to the accident and blamed Halliburton...

It reminds of that old Saturday Night Live fake commercial: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Except in the 1970s it was a matter of inconvenience, not the death of workers or whole ecosystems.

Apparently, my countrywomen and men read this and think "Hey, we need less governance, less oversight, and less control over who is doing what in the public sphere. They'll do the right thing."

How did we get so short sighted, as a country? How did we get so fearful of government? How did we get so manipulated as to believe what is so demonstrably false and not in our best interests?

We got here because that's what capitalism does - it is designed to make money, and whatever it needs to do it will do to that end. This includes flaunting safety standards, yes, of course, but this also includes getting five old white Catholics (Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Roberts and Alito) to believe in the Citizens United case that companies are people, too, and can do whatever they want in elections, just like people. Well, except vote. Well, so far.

So now we have a government of the people (which now includes corporations which have no interest except to line their own pockets), by the people (and the corporations who can spend as much hidden money as they'd like in elections) and for the people (including corporations who get to benefit from lax laws or no laws since they will be gutted by Congressmen and Women they've bought and paid for).

And now we have a midterm awash in more cash than ever, as reported in the Superior, Wisconsin, Leader-Telegram, among others - no McCain Feingold, no disclosure, no limit - and that cash is directed to one purpose: electing people who will look out for business interests.

It's the lies that money is telling that seems to be tipping the scales. I don't understand how the GOP can even be in a position to take back the House since they are the ones who got us into this economic mess, but they seem to be.

Wednesday could be a bad day for American democracy, but a good day for corporations. That's also something that Halliburton knew.
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Fall is for football

2010-09-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

I love football. Not the kind that the rest of the world plays and loves that actually involves feet (though I do appreciate that, too), but the American kind. Titanic men. Helmets. Interminable and frequent pauses in the action. Millionaire salaries.

I played it, in 5th and 6th grades, and I loved it even though I had no real aptitude for it. I didn't understand the plays all that well, but I was a cornerback so it didn't matter. The dude coming at you? Get him. (Or, in my case, watch him run by you.) But even then it seemed like an important thing to try, a way to shore up one's male bona fides. You didn't get man points for playing any other sport - football was what real men played, and that was a big factor for why I wanted to play it, too.

I watched the pro games on Sundays with my Dad, usually Bears games since CBS had the NFC contract and CBS was the channel we got. When we moved into town and the Colts moved to Indy I'd sit on the floor in the living room in front of the Montgomery Ward stereo and listen on the family's huge old headphones. The flagship station was WIBC-1070 AM and the reception was terrible - static and screech - but I could get the games, and I'd wave my white Colts rally hanky and jump up and down, even during the 3-13 seasons, even all by myself, even with the headphone cord threatening to strangle me.

If the Colts weren't playing I had a complicated system of loyalties that started with teams in the Midwest. I remember sitting in mom's Buick Skylark in the driveway as a high school senior, freezing, listening to the hated John Elway (who was drafted by the Colts but who refused to play for us) lead the Broncos 98 yards down the field to tie the Cleveland Browns in the AFC Championship game. I was banging on the steering wheel, trying to get the Browns defenders to get a stop. No avail. I was so disappointed when the Broncos won in overtime - it just didn't seem fair that such a jerk (Elway) should be so good. (I later came to hate Elway for a different reason - he donated significant money to Colorado's Proposition 2 [see earlier post, item 2]. Nice. Maybe I'm glad Indiana wasn't saddled with him and his egregious ego?)

We moved into town and in high school I dreamt of being a kicker (PK), since that seemed to suit my frame better. I got obsessive. I slept with a football for nearly a year, read all the stats of PKs in the paper from our high school's conference, from Indiana colleges, from the pros. Dean Biasucci (no, it's not pronounced "Bee-ah-SUCK-y" despite what that disgruntled fan next to you might say - it's "Bee-ah-SUE-chee," and he was awesome!) of the Colts and John Carney of the Irish were my heroes. Somewhere in a shoebox I have a letter from Gerry Faust replying to my query about how to be a good kicker. ("Practice and pray" was the gist of it.)

I played the Classic Football II handfeld video game (which no kid today would even recognize as a video game - right) and from that I learned more about screen passes, blitzes, shotgun and "I" formations. I went to every high school football game I could, all the home games and the away games with friends once I got my licence, and even though we weren't great (um, 0-56 loss at Twin Lakes, anyone?).

I was a huge Notre Dame fan, to the point where I could barely sleep on Monday nights because the college rankings came out in Tuesday morning's paper, and I couldn't wait to see where Notre Dame was ranked. I had the ND schedule memorized two years in advance. I can still tell you that Steve Beuerlein wore #7, that Allen Pinkett wore #20, and that ND beat Penn State 44-7 in 1984 mostly on Pinkett's running. I sold soda at Purdue games at Ross-Ade Stadium, where the hometown Boilers played, and even though at the time I thought of Purdue football as nothing more than a W in ND's schedule I loved that job because of the atmosphere, even in November, even when the Boilers were losing, again, to a unwatchable IU team.

Even when the Colts were crappy I'd try to go to a game a year. It wasn't easy. One year in a burst of profligacy that is breathtaking to me now, I got a cheap flight on Northwest to Indy to go to a game. My sister C-- and I would get tickets and sit 11 rows from the top of the old Hoosier Dome and watch the Colts lose their quarterback and their game to Buffalo. I loved it, and I always enjoyed the time with her.

In Hawai'i while in grad school I'd wake up at 6:45 on Sunday and ride my bike to the Eastside Grill to catch the Colts' 7:00 am HST kickoff, usually without volume, and I got to know the staff and see the same group of regulars every Sunday morning. Once when the Colts played on a Saturday morning late in the season I had to go to Waikiki to try and find the game somewhere, and I did, finally, but it was awful - I realized that part of what I liked so much about the games was the camaraderie and the tribalness of the experience. Some folks had church, I had the Eastside Grill and the NFL ticket. When I had to watch the game at another bar, well - some Catholics couldn't go to a Methodist Church on a Sunday and feel comfortable, either.

Once I road tripped to Indy to buy tickets for a game - one single game - with a fellow Colts fan. We drove down from Chicago, paid for a hotel room, paid for gas, paid for the tickets - one single game's tickets, and drove back to Chicago. I don't remember where I was living at the time, but it was a huge undertaking to get the tickets.

In LA I rode my bike up Sunset Boulevard to Hollywood Billiards every Sunday morning to watch the Colts play with the same core group of (mostly) guys from (mostly) Indiana. We gave each other shit, made each other laugh, and texted our family members to get the answers to each others' questions about Colts trivia. It was comforting to be able to say things like "Damn, dude, he couldn't start for Roncalli, you really think he's gonna start for the Jets!?" and to get a knowing laugh. I was there on January 20, 2007, when the Colts started the AFC Championship by getting behind 21-3. At halftime I paid my bill to wipe the slate clean, the dude next to me and I did a shot, and we stood, in the bar, for the entire second half. The Colts beat the Patriots for the AFC Championship - and, well, this clip says it all.

Two weeks later I was flying to Chicago so K-- and I could drive to Indiana to watch the Super Bowl in Indiana. We were so excited we could barely sleep the night before, and so hungover we could barely move the day after. We checked into the hotel, called a taxi, went to the bar and stayed for seven hours. We cried when the Colts won, and I lost my voice yelling during the game. The following day was my first day at my new job, and I had to croak through a training call with a new colleague. Worth every penny and minute and croak.

Last season I found a local here in San José, 4th Street Pizza, and I went nearly every Sunday. It was the same group of guys, the same bartender, the same give and take. It was a community, and it was fun to go every week and shoot the shit with the guy who sat at the end of the bar in his Hines Ward jersey and the Cowboys, Cardinals and Raiders fans. Even the Chargers fans, two cute guys and a girl, were fun to banter with.

I flew to Indy for the Super Bowl this past year - well, I flew to Milwaukee, rented a car, and drove down - just to be in the city, to share the camaraderie and communal experience. It was a tough game, I again lost my voice from yelling at the TV, and I was moving very gingerly the next day. I don't regret a minute, a penny, a croak, and I'd do it again.

I surprise people with my love of football. Some don't get it, think it's a colossal waste of time, and are pretty open and judgmental about it. Some, gay and non-gay both, still (yes, still) are surprised that I'm into it because I'm gay and it just can't seem to compute.

I know it's not good for me. It's a waste of time. It makes me irrational. I conflate others' cheering for teams I hate with profound character flaws, and I know I really need to restrict that to just Patriots* fans. I, a rationalist, become superstitious despite my hyper-vigilance on the matter. I wear the same jersey 16 Sundays in a row. I drink the same drinks. I have to sit in front of the lucky TV at the bar.

I know it's not good for the players. It's resulting in more frequent and more serious life changing injuries. Violence is inherent to the game unlike nearly any other team sport. The more evidence that comes out about concussions - a de facto result of nearly every play for linemen - the more disturbing it is. Players are truly at risk. As reported in the NY Times, a UPenn football player recently committed suicide and an autopsy showed evidence of profound brain damage from playing the sport. He was found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy ("CTE"), which causes impulse control and depression, and which is caused solely by repetitive head trauma. Players understand the risk and play for the rewards, particularly in the NFL when they make millions, right? Well, maybe not. It's bad for players. Most of them - more than 75% - file bankruptcy within two years of retirement.

I know it's not good for cities and states who host teams. The Meadowlands Stadium has been torn down, but according to the NYTimes its debt lives on - and it's state debt, and it's a lot - more than $110 million, which is $13 for every person in the state of New Jersey. We subsidize a sport for the enrichment of a few millionaires. I've been in Camden, New Jersey - the good folks there should not be subsidizing anyone until their schools get some funding and their high school drop out rates aren't 1 in 7. In Indy, 87% of the new stadium is publicly funded, which is outrageous in a time of shrinking budgets.

It's not good for universities. Football is by far the most expensive sport in every athletic department that has it. The University of Hawai'i at Mānoa should in no way have a FBS level football team - they just can't afford it. It costs the University $6 million a year to field a football team, and that one program runs a deficit of a million a year. This doesn't even get to the corrosive effect that having a cadre of students on campus who clearly get to play by different rules can have - even at well-run, reputable programs.

It's not good for a lot of people. I could write excoriating posts on any one of the things mentioned above about the toll football takes, why it's bad, why it shouldn't be supported. I could write why baseball - that beautiful and in some ways very un-American sport - is better, or basketball. Some day, I may write about why I have decided not to be a fan.

I think about walking away from football every year, I really do. I haven't yet, obviously. I love fall. I love the sound of crunching leaves as I haul the Sunday Chronicle down to 4th Street, the memories of me and my dad watching games when I was a kid, of me going to all those games in high school, of me and my sister sitting way up in the Hoosier Dome, of me and K-- playing cards at the bar in Chicago during timeouts, or of us sitting in Qualcomm in the rain watching Manning throw five interceptions and getting heckled by Chargers fans - the indignity! - or of us reading every word of every paper we could get our hands on the morning after the Super Bowl win.

I think about what's wrong with football, and then I think: I'll give it one more year. Because I'll remember some memory of fall, and I'll watch that clip of Addai's touchdown again and again, and I'll get goosebumps, again and again.

If you need me next Sunday I'll be down at 4th Street, in my new Colts # 25 road jersey (Powers), talking crap with the other regulars.

Maybe next year.
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Burning questions

2010-09-13T21:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, let's think about this.

A crazy Christian pastor in Florida wants to burn a Koran. This rises to the level of national security because doing so will "...inflame the sensibilities of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims" according to some. And such inflamed sensibilities will then put American servicemembers lives at risk. So President Obama and General Petraeus and various clergy members inveigh upon the nutbar - who is milking every second of his fifteen minutes of fame - to cease and desist. He does. Day saved.

Wait a minute.

First of all, why do we have to be so delicate about religious sensibilities? Burning books is odious - burning ANY book is odious - but really, if that isn't protected speech I can't think what is. If Rev. Shameless thinks that Islam (and Judaism and Hinduism and, and, and) is "of the devil," well, why not? It's all made up anyway, right? I mean the whole "My fake omnipotent creature in the sky who looks like me could beat up your fake omnipotent creature in the sky who looks like you" argument - well, it isn't. It doesn't even rise to the level of argument.

As a secularist and atheist who thinks the Constitution is about as close to "hallowed" as we get in this country, I think Rev. Lookatme absolutely had the right to burn the Koran, or the Bible or whatever. Over a billion people around the world would have been annoyed? Well... so? The only reason we care that those billion plus people would have been annoyed is because we don't have an energy policy in this country and therefore we have enriched a tiny fraction of those billion who have 12th century ideologies and 21st century weapons.

It's called "pluralism" - sometimes we're gonna disagree about stuff that makes us crazy. Grow up!

Don't like what one deranged nutbar in Florida thinks about your religion, so you're going to take to the streets in angry mobs and burn crap and shoot Americans? Really?

Okay, first, a.) if your god is so delicate that he (invariably he) is going to be umbraged by the burning of a book, I can't help you. Isn't he supposed to be omnipotent, etc.? You really think that he cares what one man - a man who isn't on board with his project ANYWAY - thinks about him and his book? Wow. That's a fragile god. Then b.) if you are so unhinged as to believe a.) to the point that you need to violate what the book itself says about how to behave to make a point on behalf of the book's alleged writer, how can we even have a conversation with you? Why the hell should we even care what you think, at that point?

Oh, we don't want to offend "deeply held religious beliefs." Why the hell not? Some people's "deeply held religious beliefs" teach them to think that humans and dinosaurs are contemporaries. As Lewis Black says, how can you even have a conversation with people who think that the Flintstones is a documentary!? You CAN'T! Deeply held religious beliefs can be just wrong. Just plain wrong. Women ought not to be covered head to toe. Or be kept from owning property. Or be kept as property. All of that is wrong, and just because someone's religion tells him it's right doesn't change that.

Personally, I think it's obnoxious to burn the Koran. I would think it similarly obnoxious for a practicing Muslim (or anyone) to put on a dress and fake a Mass. I think it's similarly obnoxious for tourists to get drunk, put on coconut bras and do fake hula. Mocking, appropriating, or denigrating someone's religious beliefs is juvenile and counterproductive, and it certainly doesn't rise to the level of discourse.

But just because we're fighting - for no good reason, by the way - a war in that part of the world doesn't mean that we need to sacrifice the gains of the Enlightenment and secularism so as not to offend "Deeply Held Religious Beliefs."

Where was this outrage when Muslims dynamited the beautiful Buddhas of Bamiyan? We can make more Korans - but statues that had stood for 1500 years and which were sacred to another religion, and which were a testament to human ingenuity, devotion, commitment and achievement, those can be dynamited because of deeply held religious beliefs? Wha...? Where is the balance? Unbelievable.

The liberal, secular West has lost its nerve. We are in danger of abandoning the values and progress of the Enlightenment. We are caving to thugs who have no sense of proportionality or regard for pluralism. We need to stand up to the bullies and psychopaths who scream at us not to burn the Koran or they'll take to the streets and kill us and not be afraid to say that they are craven, hypocritical and deranged. We need to say this exactly to the extent we need to stand up to nutbars who say you can't build an Islamic Cultural Center in Manhattan. Yes, you can.

It's all irrational, all this fear of sacrilege and talk of hallowedness, and we forget the wondrous intellectual legacy of the west - and its fiery commitment to reason, excellence, rationality, and discipline at its best - at our deep, deep peril.

And if your god is so delicate that he's offended by a burning book... how the hell does he get out of bed in the morning if he looks at Haiti?

What is hallowed is a school where girls can learn along with boys without getting acid thrown in their faces; what is sacrilege is women being stoned for adultery.

Now THAT would be a riot about sacrilege that I could get behind.
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Good news in the news -

2010-08-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

For once, some good things going down.

1. Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was captured in Thailand in 2008 in a sting operation led by the US, has finally been extradited by the Thai government to stand trial in the United States. As reported by the Bangkok Post and others, Bout has dealt arms to the FARC in Colombia, to Angolan rebels, and to murderous villains around the globe. This is a win for US diplomacy and law enforcement, and for people around the globe caught in the crossfire of armed conflict.

2. Talks! I know, I know, we've been down this road many (many!) times before, but direct talks have been restarted between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. From the reports today on the News Hour, we'll know they're serious if the principals involved are Netanyu and Abbas, not delegations, but this is a hopeful first step. There were no pre-conditions set for talks, and everyting is on the table. We'll see where it goes.

3. And in a story covered by the NY Times, there has been a shift in who is holding our nation's debt - away from other governments and toward us. For the first time since 2000 foreign governments were net sellers of US bonds and most of the rest of the new debt is held by Americans. This has significant implications for foreign policy, long term solvency, and the ability of the Treasury to issue more bonds.

"In calendar year 2007, the Treasury borrowed a net $237 billion. Of that, 81 percent came from foreign governments, mostly from central banks. Private foreign investors took up the rest, as American companies, banks and individuals reduced their combined Treasury holdings by $13 billion.

It's a step in the right direction - there are many, many more to take, but it's a step.

Good result, but...

2010-08-05T10:57:00.001-07:00

Prop 8, the gay marriage ban in California, has been ruled unconstitutional.

No, I'm not elated. I'm not relieved. I'm perhaps a tiny bit pleased, but that's all I'm allowing myself.

Of COURSE it's unconstitutional.

And of course it isn't over.

There was no other way the judge could rule, really. A majority of my neighbors, no matter how much they hate me, can't vote to take away my civil rights. Sorry. Even if they are motivated by centuries-old superstition or belong to an out of state cult that believes the Garden of Eden is in Missouri, and even if they lie and lie and lie and lie to get 50% + 1 of my neighbors to share the belief with them, it doesn't matter. The Constitution gives me protection. Or it should. I'm sure my fellow citizens of African descent can tell me what cold comfort that is - to be guaranteed things in writing that people will kill you to prevent you from having - even as they voted in favor of taking away my civil rights.

This decision means nothing. We have the most conservative Supreme Court in decades sitting now in DC, and Ms. Kagan is unlikely to have any effect on that. Justice Thomas, that intellectual light weight who is the ultimate of all affirmative action hires, is the most activist judge in the history of the court; Alito and Scalia are mean spirited, mendacious bigots, and Roberts give it all a pretty face. No, it comes down to Justice Kennedy to decide if equal protection before the law means what it has been read to have meant since 1954 - or not.

So the decision by U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker - a President Bush (père) appointee - is welcome, of course. It was a good result, and was reasoned in a way to make overturning it very difficult. We're not done, though.

The fight isn't over, I'm not elated, and I see no cause for celebration.

Well funded superstitious people - the same folks who would have made a constitutional amendment to allow witch burning because of their "faith" - will keep pouring in millions to keep the queers from having their same legal protections.

Until I get to vote on their marriages, why would I be happy? Until the Supreme Court rules, why would I be happy? Until a majority of my neighbors decides that the 14th Amendment DOES apply in California, why would I be happy?

I'm not.

I remember November mornings in Colorado in 1992; in California in 2000; in California in 2008...

Until I wake up with MORE civil rights than I had when I went to bed, well, I'll believe it when I see it. When it has some sense of the final.

Until then, it's a good result, but...

One Death in Newark

2010-07-22T00:51:00.000-07:00

A man was killed in Newark last Friday night. A black man, unarmed, was killed by a cop, shot in the chest at point blank range.

The shooting happened in Branch Brook Park, and the man who was killed was back in town for a high school reunion, returning from his current home in Atlanta.

The policeman who fired the fatal shot has said that the suspect was resisting arrest, that he had tried to flee, and that when cornered the suspect assaulted the officer.

Why was he a suspect? The Newark police were conducting a sting operation in Branch Brook Park - "scouring the park" according to the NY Times account of the story - and caught Mr. Dean Gaymon, 48, in the sting. There are no other witnesses, so we have only the perspective of the Essex County police officer in the matter.

Mr. Gaymon was President and CEO of a Credit Union in Atlanta, and he was married and leaves behind four children.

Newark, New Jersey, had its first murder free month in 40 years in April, 2010. Crime is dropping, and maybe police have the resources to focus on quality of life crimes instead of reacting to murders, assaults, and shootings - of which there were three on the night in question.
Maybe Mr. Gaymon, despite his wealth and position or perhaps because of it, was afraid to come out for fear of the opprobium of his community. Maybe he didn't see himself as gay at all, but as a happily married man who had interests in same sex sex.

Maybe being back in Newark, especially for a high school reunion, inspired regret and longing, and led Mr. Gaymon to use poor judgment. And when he was caught he panicked, seeing in that moment the ruin of his life's work, of his reputation, of his relationships, and so he tried to run.

Maybe Mr. Gaymon assaulted the arresting officer in that panic - an assault so fierce that the 29 year old officer felt compelled to shoot him, point blank, in the chest.

What we do know is that four kids don't have their dad, and a woman is left with a lot of grief and a lot of questions.

They don't at all rise to that level, but I have to say that I have a lot of questions, too. Was Mr. Gaymon able to integrate his life fully and (apparently) chose not to, or was he unable to live an integrated life? If not, why not? Was Mr. Gaymon raised in a religious home? If yes, to what extent did all of the lies he was told in that context affect him as he was going through his adolescence? Did Mr. Gaymon identify as gay at all? Did he prefer rough trade and public sex, or did he feel that was the only outlet open to him? On a different tack, is Essex County really so adequately policed that catching guys in the bushes is a good law enforcement spend? Its murder rate was 8th in the country in 2008, and nearly eleven cars are stolen there every day; there are twenty seven property crimes committed there every day; there are over three robberies every day... you get the point, and the Essex County police work the County park to make "easy" collars and ruin lives. Chances are that we wouldn't have heard about Mr. Gaymon's story if he weren't shot, point blank, in the chest, by an Essex County officer, but had he only been arrested and not killed, his life - his career, his marriage - would have been irreparably damaged.

It's an intensely human story, and it's heartbreaking. I can't help but think of the wastefulness, the wanton wastefulness of the taking of a gifted human life, and of the chain of events that led to it. It's one death in Newark, a city that saw 80 murders in 2009, and each one of those lost lives is a damn shame.

"Ice cube tray melting on the counter..."

2010-06-04T07:56:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I dated some guys that weren't so smart. I dated some who might have been underemployed, and some might have been under ambitious. But mostly, in the early nineties, they weren't real bright.

At one point in undergrad, in the depths of my "Big and Dumb" phase, one of my friends developed a scale correlating my boyfriends' intelligence to appliances. As in "Brennan, he is so dumb he'd barely make a four slice toaster. No wonder you like him."

The levels, as I remember them, started with Osterizers at the top, then self cleaning ovens, then toaster ovens, then four slice toasters, then two slice toasters, then, finally, ice cube tray melting on the counter.

That last, I realize, is not an appliance, but wow, Rich wasn't real smart. Real cute, but not so smart. So my friends had to go to something with no moving parts and no real agenda.

I met Rich at La Cage, like every good queer boy met every other queer boy in Milwaukee at the time. He was cute, so cute, with a cute pug nose, white blonde hair, about 5'6, and had a certain... well, what at first I took for studied insouciance. Turns out that there just wasn't really anybody home.

It was the winter of 1990-91, and it was really cold. The windows in LaCage would steam up and the fog machine would start and they'd play "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" three times a night and the dance floor would fill each time.

And I would look over at Rich, across the dance floor as I flailed around to C+C Music Factory or Black Box or Dee-Light, and when he looked at me I'd look away. And then I'd wait for a flail or two and I'd look back and he'd look away. In more contemporary parlance, you could say that I had NO GAME. None.

In my defense, I was new to dating - I didn't really date in high school, not boys, certainly, so all the awkward mistakes and discoveries that adolescents usually get to make before they move on and leave high school wince-inducing moments behind I was making in my early 20's. And I was making them with a vengeance. I started slowly, and moved slower still, and without the intervention of my friends I'd not have gotten very far at all. But I still made more than share of wince inducers.

I found out from a friend of a friend of a friend - it was Milwaukee and the dance floor wasn't that big - that his name was Rich and that he worked at the TGI Fridays at Northridge Mall. I didn't have a car then but I was working at Northridge Mall for a Mortgage Company (of all things) and I thought there would be a great chance for me to go over there and see him at work. What I would do once I got there, well, I had no plan, but at least I could go see him. And pretend not to, presumably.

Weeks went by, and Rich and I kept avoiding talking to each other at La Cage, and I kept avoiding TGI Fridays, and finally my friends got tired of hearing me talk about how cute this Rich guy was so it was time to either put up or shut up already! We piled in to my friend Tom's Jimmy 4x4 one cold Wednesday night and made the trek out to suburbia.

I was really, really nervous - I mean this guy was CUTE, and what was I gonna say, like, "Hi, I think you're really cute, you wanna go out" (see above re: missed adolescence)?

We get there and I'm too nervous to be asked to be seated in Rich's section, so we just get seated. I didn't even ask if Rich was working that night. My friend Cheryl had heard and seen just about enough, so she walked back to the host stand, asked if he was working, asked to meet him (she hadn't seen him yet), brought him BACK to our table, and asked him if he would please just give me his number.

Blushingly, he did. Blushingly, I took it, and actually called him that night when I knew I would get his machine (yes, wayyy before cell phones). Something like "Hey, Rich, you met my friend Cheryl and me tonight, and I was wondering..." Wince-inducing. Oddly enough, he called me back and we agreed to go out on Friday. Again, I had no car - he had a VW Rabbit, which I thought was adorable and at least he knew how to drive a clutch, so that was something - so he agreed to come to my place and pick me up and we'd go to a movie.

I was still so smitten with him that I was shedding IQ points around him and didn't have too much to say, but after a few dates we went to dinner at the East Side Big Boy and my roommate was gone so we came back to my place and were sitting on the couch and...

To this point, we hadn't properly kissed. We'd exchanged chaste good night pecks on the cheek, but that was all, and it was clearly time for some advances in this department. He hadn't been pushy but it was a few dates in and we were in our 20's, for god's sake; it was time for a more proper make out session.

And I had very little practice in this department. And I was really nervous, because I just found him so dreamy.

Our apartment was a one bedroom that I shared with a roommate, and it was all hard floors, bare walls and dorm furniture. From the sofa to any other part of the apartment was not very far, and it was an open floor plan so sound traveled and there was no place to hide.

Our couch was six foot long and orange Naugahyde, and if one got nervous and started to perspire one would stick to it. I was nervous, and perspiring, and I was sticking to it, so I went to the bathroom, three feet away, and promptly got sick. Multiple times.

He HAD to have heard me - the door was exactly what you'd expect from a college apartment and the entire apartment was tile flooring. I was in there for ages, brushing my teeth in the vain hope that maybe we could pick up where we left off, but after fifteen minutes or so I come back out, sheepishly, and sit back down next to him. He asks "Did you get sick?!" and I say no, yeah, I was just feeling a little funny after dinner. He says he should prolly go, I understand, he stands on his toes to kiss me on the cheek, we say we'll talk tomorrow and he leaves.

To his credit, he did call, and we went out again, and he was a good kisser and I had to have improved with his tutelage. The more we hung around, the more I realized, though, that this guy who I found so attractive - literally, debilitatingly attractive - didn't have too much in common with me. He didn't read, he wasn't into sports, he wasn't into music, he didn't care about politics at all, he didn't play cards, he couldn't really carry on a conversation with me or anyone in my social circle, and he wasn't interested in anything. After the third time having dinner with my group of friends, they were unsparing: "Puker, this is the guy you threw up over?" And "Well, he sure is blonde." And the final, lasting assessment from my friend Erin: "I'd have to say 'Ice cube tray melting on the counter.' He's really, really dumb."

All told, from first TGI Fridays foray to final date, it was six weeks, tops. It's about the cumulative experience with dating, right? And from Rich I learned that I could be a little more assertive; I learned that making out was fun but wasn't enough to sustain a relationship; I learned that beauty is skin deep, sometimes, and I learned that my friends could be counted on for an honest opinion (not that I'd had much doubt on that score to start with).

And never again did I slide so far down the appliance scale. Live and learn.
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Thanks for the memories, Ken -

2010-06-03T10:31:00.000-07:00

This morning, ESPN reported that Ken Griffey, Jr., is retiring from Major League Baseball and the Seattle Mariners, effective immediately. He's 40.

Griffey was always one of my favorite players. When he came into the league in 1989 he played 127 games, bat .264, slugged .420, had 61 RBI and hit 16 homers. As a 19 year old rookie, that ain't a bad stat line. He was an All Star thirteen times; he was a Gold Glove winner ten times; he was a Silver Slugger Award winner eleven times.

I'm not a huge baseball guy, but when writers and other players would talk about Junior having "the prettiest swing in baseball," even I got what they meant by it. It was like the ball slowed down for him - like he always knew where it would be - and he so fluidly put his bat right on it. Graceful and easy and smooth. Pretty.

And he never cheated or doped to do any of it, in an era when nearly everyone around him did.

As SF Chronicle Sportswriter John Shea wrote,

Griffey is fifth all time in home runs with 630. Of the players in the top 10, five ended their careers before 1977: Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson and Harmon Killebrew. Four got there with paper trails to performance-enhancing drugs: Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodriguez and Mark McGwire.

Junior didn't.

I liked him when he came up because he was a breath of fresh air to baseball. He was young and handsome - I dug the fade haircut - and sublimely talented, and he wore his hat backwards, and he was a breath of fresh air. It seemed like even though he was from baseball royalty (his dad was a star with the Reds and the Yankees) he never acted like it.

He flat out played - every ball, every out, every pitch. He loved the game, he loved his job, he had fun doing it, and he gave the game his whole effort, every time. His catches - beyond the fence, over the shoulder, fully stretched out - are you kidding me? He was grace and athleticism in motion. He had a megawatt smile and just exuded his enthusiasm.

Watch this video, starting at the 2:00 minute mark, and then watch him smile as he runs back to the dugout. How can you not love this guy? How can you not love the game he plays?

He gave Seattle some of its best sports memories. In the 1995 ALDS against the Yankees, Seattle lost the first two games and was on the verge of elimination. Junior solo homered in the bottom of the 8th to bring the M's within one, and then in the bottom of the 11th, down 5-4, he was on first when Edgar Martinez hit a double. It's the bottom of the 11th, remember, in the final game to determine who gets to play Cleveland for the American League Pennant. Junior sprinted - flew - around the bases to home from 1st on a double, sliding safe and scoring the winning run.

Pandemonium, as they say, ensued. And there was that smile.

(You can watch it here. )

How much did Seattle love him? After he left the M's for the Reds, he returned for Interleague play in a new uni and his hometown fans still gave him a ten minute standing ovation.

That's love.

Without the injuries he suffered in Cincinnati, he "no doubt" would have won the all time home run title instead of Barry Bonds, according to Joe Buck, Mike Scioscia and others. The fact that in spite of his injuries he never turned to performance enhancing drugs to speed a recovery speaks to his character and his respect for the game.

I don't watch as much baseball now as I did in the 1990's. I'm sure there's some kid out there who truly loves the game, who sprints out to his position in the outfield at every half inning, who sees every game - every pitch - as a personal challenge and an opportunity to do his best. I don't know who he is, though, and he's not my age and prolly doesn't share my birthday, and he's prolly not as charismatic or handsome as Griffey was, and he prolly doesn't have that megawatt smile, and for sure - for absolute, positive, 100% sure - he's no Junior.

I guess I'll just have to look forward to all of the highlights again when Junior gets into Cooperstown. I won't have to wait that long. It'll be on the first ballot.

Dateline, Tokyo - THAT didn't last long

2010-06-02T21:58:00.001-07:00

Japan's new coalition government, led by the Democratic Party of Japan ("DPJ"), is struggling, and before this summer's elections to the upper house of the Diet, Mr. Yukio Hatoyama has fallen on his sword, figuratively, and tendered his resignation. (Interestingly, he has also tendered the resignation of the DPJ's #2, Mr. Ichiro Ozawa, who was embroiled in a fundraising scandal.)

I felt that the DPJ's win was healthy for Japan as it provided a break from the decades-long rule of the Liberal Democratic Party ("LDP"). It was a chance for Japan to break out of the doldrums of its "lost decade" of recession, stagnation, deflation - c'mon, you remember it, stagflation - and also to move beyond the cronyism of LDP party leadership and the countryside's hold on domestic politics.

I still think those things, but the future for the DPJ led coalition looks grim? Why? Because the Prime Minister of Japan had made a campaign promise to move the U.S. Marine base out of Okinawa, and he found, once in office, that he couldn't do it. President Obama said that we were going to keep the base there, and the conversation ended. Public opinion, teetering anyway due to the scandals of Mr. Ozawa, turned, a coalition partner bolted, and Mr. Hatoyama had to do the honorable thing and resign.

American military requirements and priorities helped to cashier an elected Prime Minister of a close and long-standing ally.

There's more to it than that - the finance scandals didn't help, and many Japanese didn't want the base moved, and with its departure, a more equal relationship between Japan and the United States - but there is no question that his inability to get the deal done was the crux.

Probably, North Korea sinking a South Korean ship reawakened Japanese fears of living in an unstable neighborhood; and it certainly didn't help Mr. Hatoyama's efforts to wean the Japanese off American military support. Leftists were outraged by the backtrack, the Social Democrats walked out of his coalition, and those on the right never wanted the base to be moved in the first place. His coaltion's approval ratings went from 70% down to the high teens, and Mr. Hatoyama was left isolated and without support. He had no choice.

This is a win for South Korea, who hosts a large US contingent on its soil but will be reassured by the close proximity of the Futenma base to the Korean peninsula (other proposals included Guam, which would be an additional three hours away), and therefore this is a loss for North Korea. China also likely sees this as a loss, since Mr. Hatoyama had pledged to strengthen Japan's ties with its Asian neighbors (a/k/a "China").

Domestically, it remains to be seen if the DPJ can right itself and recover enough political goodwill to lead the nation through some difficult choices, including tax increases, decreases in spending, and currency negotiations with the Chinese.

The world's second largest economy, the United States' close ally, and Asia's most stable and developed democracy is going to have it's fourth Prime Minister in four years. And President Obama doesn't have to worry about domestic political fallout from losing a base lease in a sensitive region; we get to keep our base on Okinawa.

We are still an Imperial power even though the man wielding that power on our behalf isn't as mendacious as callow as the last one.

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Letter to the Editor, SF Chronicle, 2-June

2010-06-02T21:53:00.000-07:00

In its entirety.

The day I really knew Harvey Milk's legacy
Harvey Milk Day was officially celebrated, to my mind, profoundly on May 19 on the 8:40 p.m. Caltrain heading south, overhearing the conversation of two young men as they entered the bike car at the Redwood City station.

They were engaged in conversation as they entered, appearing well groomed, intelligent and most of all straight, from all appearances, until I overheard one say that he has a cousin who lives in San Francisco, on Valencia Street, near a restaurant. This young man's next words, expressed in the most nonchalant manner, were that he had eaten dinner at this restaurant with his boyfriend.

Milk's vision inspired equality, living on in this young man's free expression of himself that everyone could overhear. Harvey Milk Day, officially celebrated on May 22, had come early, on the Caltrain, in that bike car, within that young man's conversation.

Happy birthday, Harvey Milk, for this young man and all those expressing their freedom with a natural pride instead of having to hide.

Donald Howard, Palo Alto

So, this is nice...

2010-06-01T21:01:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about the closet over the past few days - how it warps people, how it diminishes them, how "the closet is a cold, lonely place that makes you lie again and again to those closest to you and always risks ending in tears," as Graham McKerrow put it.

People can grow comfortable with it, and "people" includes those who put themselves in as well as those who expect others to stay there. People like John McCain ostensibly speaking for the US Military; the Catholic Church which has been running its own "Don't Ask Don't Tell" shell game for a few centuries now; and countless parents, to name a few.

My dad has other queer children - out of the ten of us, that's not too surprising - and one other sibling has self disclosed to me, so it's not conjecture that they (sic) are queer. But because they haven't told Dad, they are welcome in his home with whomever they want to bring. I, and this likely is not a surprise, am not.

I could have stayed in the closet and thus have been able to bring anyone I wanted to family reunions - even the person with whom I have chosen to spend my life. We could whisper behind Dad's back, me and "the cool siblings," the ones I would tell, and it would all be wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and my personal integrity would be shot to hell for the sake of not aggrieving a bigoted man's prejudices.

I would be ceding permission to determine my integrity. I would be acceding to someone else passing judgment on the quality - not even the quality, but the very validity - of my relationship, of my love.

Why would I do that? How could I do that? I couldn't. Too much Thoreau, maybe, or too much Shakespeare or Whitman or Joyce or even Catholic teaching:

Deep within their consciences men and women discover a law which they have not laid upon themselves and which they must obey... Their dignity rests in observing this law, and by it they will be judged.

So I followed "this law that I discovered" and I came out, and incurred the opprobrium of some family and friends and faculty, because I didn't want "to lie again and again." Ultimately, coming out means telling the truth about your own life. It's being authentically yourself.

The person who stays in the closet must carefully, obsessively, maniacally construct and maintain a façade. He or she may lose themselves in the construction and in the artifice, until there is no longer any there there.

Which brings me to the news item that made me reflect on this again. You'll be glad to know that California State Senator Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield, was referenced under this headline: "Outed lawmaker easing stance against gay rights."

(Well, was he outed, really? I don't think so. You may remember the State Senator from a previous post here, where he got busted for DUI after leaving a gay club with a male companion - so I kinda think the Senator outed himself.)

In any event, the article states that the Senator is re-thinking his stand on gay issues, and has declaimed as much from the floor of the Senate.

Well, better late than never, and there is one fewer miserable bastards in the world. According to State Senator Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, was quoted as saying his long-time friend and colleague "Seemed happier now."

Of course he does. He has now begun - sloppily, publicly, and criminally, but we all start somewhere - to live an authentic life. I wish him well, and hope fervently that he spends the rest of his time in the Senate working to undo some of the spiteful and small things he did in the past.

Finally, the Chronicle article cited a Bakersfield Californian article (that I couldn't find) quoting Sen. Ashburn as saying that he had begun "taking care of a lot of old baggage." Too bad that Rev. George Reker's "rentboy" can't help him with that kind of baggage.

Welcome, Senator. It gets easier from here.
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Stories in the news

2010-05-31T17:39:00.000-07:00

I tried - diligently - to find some good news stories this week, but there's more crappy news than in a whole Billy Joel song. These stories prolly won't help if you're in a news-funk, but here are some things less covered this past week:

1. On the topic of the Closet, a forcefully written piece saying some of the things I was trying to get across in my post yesterday. Worth a read.

David Laws: Yet again, hiding in the closet proves a politician's undoing
It is hardly credible that in 2010, after all the progress that has been made, the gay liberation message still needs to be heard

(Graham McKerrow guardian.co.uk, Saturday 29 May 2010 16.30 BST; full article here.)

2. And I can't believe that asshole McCain has threatened to filibuster the Senate to prevent a vote on Don't Ask, Don't Tell - in essence, demanding that our brave women and men who serve stay in the closet. It's disgusting, ands it's directly counter to his previous views. But he's lost all integrity in trying to win his GOP primary. By tacking so far to the right, will he be vulnerable to an energized push by the Democratic party in Arizona to vote him out? It'll be one race to watch in September and October.

3. The Green Party Australia has seen a surge in support, basically because voters on the left are fed up with Labor, according to the Australian. It's still only on 16%, but it's up 4% over the past month. Full story here.

4. According to a poll published in L’Actualité (mérci encore, Celeste!), Americans are among the most sceptical in the world when it comes to believing the science that human inputs are responsible for climate change. In the US, 59% don't believe it; Manitoba and Saskatchewan are the North Americans who come closest at 52%. I'm afraid the inference is clear: we're a nation of Prairie Provinces. Full results here (in French; scroll down for the full table).

5. In political news from Hawai'i, Ed Case has dropped out of the race for the HI-1 Congressional seat. Why is this noteworthy? A Republican, Charles Djou, won the seat held for the previous ten terms by Neil Abercrombie, a staunch old lefty who surrendered the seat to run for governor. It's Barack Obama's home district - well, of course, his home district outside of Kenya. The Dem vote was split in the special election by two strong candidates, and Djou won. It's fundamentally a liberal Democratic seat and Case dropping out gives Colleen Hanabusa, the remaining Democrat candidate, a great chance to win it back. It'll be another one to watch in November.

6. I can't say anything about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. What can be said? It's disgusting, disheartening and demoralizing. Longer post later. Let me just close with this:

BP's Safety record isn't great, have you heard? According to a story by ABC news and others,

According to the Center for Public Integrity, in the last three years, BP refineries in Ohio and Texas have accounted for 97 percent of the "egregious, willful" violations handed out by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)... OSHA statistics show BP ran up 760 "egregious, willful" safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.

But that's okay - corporations are people, too, and have a constitutional right to spend as much as they want to support their candidates in elections. Just ask the 5/4ths of the Supreme Court.

And that's all I got. Here's to a better June.

Just come out, already (UK version)

2010-05-30T16:48:00.000-07:00

The Liberal Democrat Chief Treasury secretary, David Laws, has resigned in the first scandal to buffet the UK's new coalition government.

Laws was meant to be the "hatchet man" of the coalition, cutting huge swaths of government spending. The Conservatives trusted him to do it, and the Lib Dems trusted him to do it as humanely and reasonably as possible. Some on both sides are saying that he's irreplaceable, and that this strikes a deep blow to the coalition.

What did he do that was so wrong?

From the Guardian story:

Laws, a former banker, felt obliged to quit on Saturday after it was revealed he claimed £40,000 in rent expenses from the Commons authorities to cohabit in a property owned by his secret partner, James Lundie. He is understood to have considered quitting as an MP as well.

That's a lot, forty thousand quid, and it sounds bad. BUT - had he come out and said that Mr. Lundie was his partner and/ or taken the mortgage out jointly, he'd've been entitled to MORE. It was £40,000 (~US$60,000) over eight years, or about £750 (US$1100)/ month.

Not nothing, of course, and rules are rules, and as the hatchet man who was likely going to have the single biggest role in new government in cutting money from the budget - to education, to health care, to the disabled, to seniors, to jobs programs - he had to be above reproach and couldn't have been seen to have been feeding at the public trough.

But he didn't need the money, and he wasn't lining his pockets - again, the amount over which he has resigned is less than if he and his partner had put their names jointly on the lease.

So why not come out, declare the relationship, and claim the money legitimately? The Liberal Democrats are the most progressive of the three parties in the UK, so he would have felt no pressure from that quarter. Again from Michael White's piece, "It's not a big deal at Westminster any more, nor in most constituencies, I'd wager, unless it's a big deal to the individual for a host of reasons – most of which are none of our business."

Do people have the right to remain in the closet? Yes.

Should they? Well, clearly they do, and without being in Mr. Laws' shoes I cannot speak for him or speculate as to the "host of reasons" he may have had.

But he was independently wealthy, he was a rising star in a rising party, he had access to nearly every lever of power that can protect a man from anti-gay animus, and he still chose not to come out. I hope he reads the case of the two gay men sentenced to hard labor for 14 years in Malawi for being gay and can draw some courage from them.

Come on, people - don't be afraid. In the west, in the UK, for people of power, wealth and position, it's far better to be out than in.

The government has been damaged - and there is unanimity on that point, from the Times to the Independent to the Sun - and it is damage that could have been avoided had one minister come out.

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Portugal gets gay marriage

2010-05-17T12:39:00.000-07:00

If I had asked you twenty years ago to name the first six European coutries to extend marriage rights to gays and lesbians, would you have put Portugal in the mix?

Me neither.

Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and the Netherlands would have been my picks, and Catholic Portugal woulda been way down the list somewhere around Spain and Malta, but the whole Iberian Peninsula* now has gay marriage. Portugal is the sixth European nation to decide that "Separate but Equal" isn't and that all citizens should be extended all rights. (And in case you have travel plans, the other five are: the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway and Sweden. I was close.)

The coolest thing? It became law over the signature of the center right president, Anibal Cavaco Silva, just three days after the Prada-wearing Papa Nazi, Pope Benedict XVI, paraded through in all his fancy robes and told them not to do it. President Silva, unlike Fr. Wild at Marquette, didn't cave to ecclesiastical pressure in a non-ecclesiastical issue and signed the bill that had been passed by the legislature in January.

Portugal is 90% (nominal) Catholic, and this current Pontiff has made maintaining Catholic Europe's orthodoxy and fidelity to Church teaching a key component of his papacy. And by orthodoxy, of course, the Church fathers mean on groinal issues. No women priests, no legalized abortion, restrictive laws on divorce, and certainly, beyond a doubt, no acceding to legal recognition of queer relationships.

Good luck with putting that cat back in the bag.

Of the nations at the bottom of the table for birth rates, for example, are 90%+ Catholic Italy (219 out of 221), Austria (215), Monaco (207) and Spain (197); the bottom quarter of countries and territories on the table is heavily Catholic. I don't think it's that hetero folks in these places are having less sex - I think it's that hetero folks in these countries are deciding that they can exercise some control over their own bodies; that women are deciding that they are not units of baby-making production; that it isn't AD 1636; that the Church is simply wrong on this issue, and intractable for no good reason.

And the more the Church harps on groinal issues which go against what is rational and empirical in their daily lives, the more Western Europeans - and Cubans and Puerto Ricans and Québecois and millions of others - realize the Church is wrong about other things as well. Like, well, gay rights. And intractable about being wrong for no good reason.

So Portugal, Catholic Portugal, has marriage equality now. Along with Catholic Spain. And Catholic Belgium. This would have been unthinkable twenty years ago, but by refusing to learn the lessons of Europe's greatest gift to the world, the Enlightenment, and refusing to accept or accommodate them, the Church is in danger of making itself irrelvant in its historical heartland.

So maybe it's time for the Church to pack up and move back to the Mideast, from whence it came - less need for rationality there, and more zest for following superstition and persecuting others (women, queers, Jews, those who believe in different made up superstitions than you). It could feel right at home!

Just leave the billions worth of art and music made for you. And thanks for Chartres, anyway!

*Except, of course, for Britons on Gibraltar.

(Arch-) Bishop in checkmate? Marquette hiring drama continues

2010-05-15T09:56:00.000-07:00

A ha!

I've been puzzled for the last week how Father Wild, Marquette University president, could have blundered so badly in the Jodi O'Brien case. Dr. O'Brien was offered a job, signed a contract, turned it in, and then had the offer rescinded - but NOT because she is Lesbian, according to the President's office, but because she'd conducted some research that was "anti-family".

I've been puzzled in part because Fr. Wild has been a strong leader for inclusivity and the educative value of diversity at Marquette. According to the Journal Sentinel, when asked about diversity of thought on a Jesuit campus in 2006, he wrote:

The presence of these men and women enriches us as a university, helps us to consider questions that we might otherwise not consider, gives the university community a wider perspective. In turn, we try to assist these individuals to engage more deeply with their own particular faith tradition.

The leader of the faculty search committee, Dr. Franzoi, said that he told Fr. Wild not to pick Dr. O'Brien if the University wasn't prepared to defend their position given that she was an out lesbian who conducted research about same gender relationships. If that's the case, and it sounds more than plausible, then Fr. Wild and the Board had ample "warning" to review the hire and make sure Dr. O'Brien would be a good fit as dean of Arts and Sciences. Why make the hire unless you were sure?

The offer was extended, contract provided, signed and returned. And then last Friday, May 7, the offer was rescinded.

What happened? No one but Bob Wild knows, and he's not telling. When asked by a student in a listening session on the matter if the Archbishop of Milwaukee applied pressure, Fr. Wild responded with an "I can't comment on that." Translation: yes.

Another salvo in the wars between Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy and university leadership, and it bodes ill. In the past, Catholic Universities could do pretty much whatever they wanted on campus. Local bishops could scold or fret, but that was the extent of it - most universities had lay boards and made hiring and policy decisions based on what was best for the university while maintaining a public posture in support of Catholic doctrine.

In the (surprisingly thorough) "Scholarship, mission collide" in the Journal Sentinel on May 14 there is a good summary of the recent history of these relationships in the US.

What's changed is the new pope. The last one was bad enough on matters of doctrine, but really the terrier behind the stool was the current Pope, Ratzinger. He is an arch conservative enforcer who wants a smaller, more "Catholic" church - no more smorgasbording, you have to believe it all. He has continued naming bishops who share his beliefs, so that the church has lurched rightward over the last two decades.

And he is very, very obsessed with groinal issues. Condoms cause AIDS, homosexuality is a sin, women are tainted, you can only fully participate in the hierarchy if you're a man, baby.

Listecki, the new archbishop of Milwaukee, has been in office 6 months. Fr. Wild has six months to go.

The O'Brien case makes sense if it is seen as a pissing match between an incoming archbishop looking to enforce a certain orthodoxy on the largest institution in his see - with the full backing of sex-obsessed Vatican higher-ups - and a lame duck University President. It's a shame that this good man, Fr. Wild, will leave on such a sour note. He was good for MU. But he co-signed the rescission, for whatever reason, so he made his bed.

But more of a shame than that is the personal toll this has taken on Dr. O'Brien; the toll this has taken on Marquette as an institution of serious scholarship; the likely long-term chilling effects this will have on academic freedom at MU and other Catholic universities in the US; the recalibration of the relationship between university and bishop in the US decidedly in the bishop's favor (and Listecki, like Clarence Thomas, is unlikely to have divine recall anytime soon - he is only 61).

What of the Church? Hopeless. All those who have stayed in it for decades saying things like "If we all leave, who will be left to change it?" or "eventually women will be ordained" or "eventually, priests will be able to marry, like in the early church" can throw in the towel. With our current Prada-wearing Papa Nazi there's no change a-comin'. No roles for women, except to have babies - and its corollary, of course, no hope for those who think maybe birth control is a good idea.

Ossified, bitter, fearful but orthodox. Good luck with that. And good luck to Catholic universities being taken seriously, if this trend continues with other presidents and bishops. A pillar of the American middle class and of Catholic immigrant integration into the mainstream is being marginalized for the sake of doctrinal purity.

And for those who need a made up belief system to get them through life, there's always the Episcopalians - they just ordained another lesbian bishop. If you don't need the songs, doctrine, history or garments, though, I recommend FSM.
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New UK Home Sec'y Theresa May

2010-05-12T08:57:00.000-07:00

Final note on the UK election - in my last post I'd indicated that Chris Grayling was going to be Home Secretary in the new Cameron-lead Tory-Liberal Democrat government; he was bounced in favor of Theresa May, a MP from Maidenhead in Berkshire since 1997. Ms. May has a poor voting record on GLBTQ issues, including voting against age of consent equality, same sex parent adoptions, and Lesbian IVF rights.

She was picked over Chris Darling who, though he was recorded saying that business owners ought to be able to discriminate against same sex couples, actually had a more moderate voting record on GLBTQ issues.

Welcome to "Elections have consequences, UK edition." Most gay folks in Britain voted Lib Dem (or more accurately, expressed intent to vote Lib Dem), and there's no question that Mr. Clegg's party is miles ahead of the Conservatives on these issues. We'll see how much pull he has as minority party leader in the coalition after all.

UK election results - last thoughts

2010-05-11T23:26:00.000-07:00

It’s been fascinating, but the drama in the UK has finally wound down and the Tory leader, David Cameron, is the new Prime Minister and Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, is deputy Prime Minister. Mr. Cameron's party, the Conservatives, won the most seats and the largest share of the vote, and the Tories and Liberal Democrats have formed a coalition government.

So. What does this mean?

Well, for queer folk the place they’ve held in civil life in Britain over the last thirteen years of Labour governments is suddenly less assured. Despite Mr. Cameron’s best efforts to modernize the party, there are still those in the British Conservative Party like Philippa Stroud, who, not unlike George Rekers, feels that it’s possible to “pray away the gay,” and Chris Grayling, the Home Secretary, who thinks that business owners ought to be able to discriminate against gay customers.

For British society, it is likely going to be a tough few years. There are parts of Britain that have been hollowed out by the collapse of the industrial economy, and that have been significantly supported over the past thirteen years of Labour ascendancy by disbursements from Whitehall. This will end.

The old industrial core of peripheral cities – not those that most enjoyed the long economic expansion under New Labour, but those outside the southeast of England, like Manchester and Birmingham and Liverpool, and Newcastle, with unemployment rates 40% or more higher than the national median – will face deep funding cuts from the Central Government. Health care and education will almost assuredly get more expensive, and there will be large swathes of the British hinterland inhabited by those who won’t be able to afford it. Unemployment disbursements will likely be trimmed. Almost assuredly, the gaps between rich and poor will grow, and class stratification will be further reinforced. Some people will make a ton of money, and many more will slide further into poverty.

The Liberal Democrats are likely going to try to blunt the worst of the cuts – they are, after all, a fundamentally leftist party with a strong commitment to social services – and because the Tories can’t govern without them they may be able to do it. But cuts are coming, there’s no question. A friend in the UK reckons that it’s good for Labour to not have formed a Lib-Lab government for exactly that reason – cuts are coming and Labour can go into opposition, say that they would have done things differently and less painfully, and wait for the Lib Dems to get frustrated by the more strident of their Tory partners and walk out of the coalition resulting in new elections.

The clear loser in all of this is former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He lived in Blair’s shadow for a decade, and seemed to have a very different temperament than his former PM and Labour leader. Mr. Brown was not an inculcator of celebrity, was not an opportunist, was not demonstrably shackled by the popular. He was the son of a vicar, a committed advocate of the working class, and a man with a core set of values that animated his behaviour in the public life. In his outgoing speech, he was quoted in the Guardian as saying, about being Prime Minister:

I loved the job for its potential to make this country I love fairer, more tolerant, more green, more democratic, more prosperous and more just – truly a greater Britain.

He led Labour to a loss of 89 seats in the House of Commons and simply couldn’t remain as their head. He may yet be back, but he did the honourable thing by falling on his sword and saying that he would step down as leader of Labour, first, and then as Prime Minister. He was an honorable public servant, and as Britons get a better sense of the callow Mr. Cameron, 43, they may miss the “dour Scotsman” yet. Certainly those Britons who live in the northeast or West Midlands, those who are working class, those who are queer, those who need Whitehall's support in their local communities - those Britons will likely miss Mr. Brown most of all, and soonest.

Perhaps Ms. Stroud can pray away their poverty and loss, while she's at it.

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Et tu, Marquette?

2010-05-10T08:13:00.000-07:00

(Or as a friend put it to me: "MU blah, blah.")

In grad school at the U of Hawai`i I found far more dogmatism than I found in my undergrad at conservative, Catholic, Jesuit Marquette. At UH there were simply ideas that were off the table, or that were considered too inflammatory to discuss.

At Marquette? We talked about reporductive rights in one of my very first classes on campus, Phil 050. I was shocked. I knew the Church's position, and here we were talking about other ideas and viewpoints. Here were people who thought a woman had a right to choose whether or not to end her pregnancy! I was shocked - I'm not kidding, I'd never met anyone who had espoused that viewpoint before. And while it was a minority opinion in that classroom, it was discussed and considered and people who thought differently from you were treated with respect, even as you disagreed with them.

I learned about academic freedom, and that one of the things that the Jesuits held dear was that there must be a free exchange of ideas for there to be education - not training, but real education - to happen.

MU didn't always live up to its lofty ideals. One chilly morning in 1989 I was stunned when I realized what the maintenance workers were doing with a high pressure hose outside LaLumiere Hall - they were pressure washing the sidewalks. Someone had gone around campus the night before and had chalked "Gay is okay" at various points around campus.

Chalked.

At that time, chalking sidewalks was done by nearly every organization on campus - advertisements for happy hours on Wells Street; study abroad meeting notices; campus ministry volunteer opportunities - they were all broadcast by chalk. (There was no email or texting or cellphones then, remember, so groups had to chalk boards or sidewalks to get news out.) In Milwaukee in the spring, they'd last a few days and then it would inevitably precipitate in some form and there was a tabula rasa for new notices ready and waiting. And there had never been any movement by anyone at the school to wash anything off before. It had been okay to tout 50 cent tappers at the 'Lanche, Ladies night at O'D's, frat parties and poster sales at the Union.

So why was the University power washing sidewalks to remove "Gay is okay"? I was stunned. And went home and thought about it, decided it was illogical, wrote a letter to the Marquette Tribune, and started coming out by showing my letter to one of my roommates and asking his thoughts.

All this was in my mind on Friday when our alma mater got mentioned in the NY Times. Not for great undergraduate education, however, or professorial research, or even for men's basketball, but for discrimination.

As reported in the NY Times and in more depth in the Journal Sentinel, Dr. Jodi O'Brien, a soiciologist and professor at Seattle University, was offered a position at Marquette University to be Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, accepted the offer, and then had the offer rescinded after intercession by the President's Office.

Dr. O'Brien is an out lesbian who did nothing to hide her orientation during the interview process. I don't know how she could have, given her scholarly writings. The search committee made it an explicit point that she was lesbian. From the Journal Sentinel:

Psychology professor Stephen Franzoi, who served on a search committee for the post, said faculty members forwarded two candidates to Marquette President Father Robert A. Wild and Provost John Pauly. In their recommendation, committee members warned Wild and Pauly not to pick O'Brien if the university was not willing to support her if her sexual orientation or if her scholarship were criticized, Franzoi said.

So now Fr. Wild, who has done a ton of good work for Marquette in moving the institution beyond some of its more shameful past and positioning it as a place that's affirming of GLBT students, says, effectively, "We didn't read her work closely enough and she's anti-family"!?

First, this discriminatiion has a personal side, as discrimination always does. The woman at the heart of the story, Dr. O'Brien, was offered a significantly bigger job, across the country. Have you ever had that experience? I have - it's exciting! You look at neighborhoods, you tell loved ones, you look at cost of living calculators, you start planning all of the thousands of details that go into a move like this. You give your landlord notice or you put your house up for sale; you make an announcement at work; when is your last day and when will be your first, and if you can afford a vacation in between; you wonder if it's the right thing to do. You wonder who's a good dentist, where the bus routes go, who has a decent cup of coffee... it's exciting and stressful and becomes all-consuming.

This woman, it now looks like, will be staying in Seattle at least another year, with colleagues who know she was looking and had an offer. Awkward at best. She has a secure position so unlike the thousands and thousands of queer Americans who are discriminated against every day in this country, she won't be out in the cold - but she had in her hands an offer for what was likely a significant salary jump, and she had it pulled from her. How must that feel? I'd be enraged, insulted, and on the phone with a lawyer.

What about MU? What had they hoped, with this decision? Everyone on campus is now talking about discrimination, everyone is thinking about the role of queer folk in the life of religious institutions, the campus is being engaged in discourse about the visibility of queer folk, how to live up to the official University position of Cura Personalis.

A university is an open place, a place for ideas and discourse and for all ideas being on the table. A Jesuit university, at its best, is a place where everyone can engage in the conversation and at which every idea can be examined, held up to scrutiny, weighed and debated and evaluated and tested.

MU at its best truly educated me. I can only hope this ham-fisted, clumsy attempt to disregard its intellectual heritage and to turn its back on a hire that could further help lead it to intellectual excellence will not stick, any more than pressure washing sidewalks did a generation ago.

Marquette knows better, and the resulting conversation may yet prove that to be true. In the meantime, for all those questioning GLBTQ in the Marquette family, now's a great time to have the conversation with your loved ones. And for those of us who are already out, it's a great time to challenge our school to be the best it can be.

And Dr. O'Brien, I hope to see you in Marquette Hall at some point!
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UK Election Results - first thoughts

2010-05-06T21:17:00.001-07:00

It was a bad election for Labour, no question.

For those of you who have a life and haven't been following UK politics, Labour were of course going to have a rough night and a bad election. They have been in power since Tony Blair led the New Labour tide almost exactly thirteen years ago and they were tired and saddled with a poor economy, two deeply unpopular wars and the baggage of over a decade of consecutive governance and three consecutive Labour victories. Tony Blair might be Britain's President Clinton - smart, loved and reviled, a huge personality who overshadowed his successor. But instead of Al Gore running during a time of peace and prosperity, imagine him running after the economy crashed and the nation was enquagmired in two wars.

What's shocking is not that Labour is having a bad night, it's that David Cameron, the Tory leader (Tory = Conservative), hasn't managed to close the deal with the British people. Tonight should be an absolute shellacking, and it's not. The Tories might yet win an absolute majority (in the UK parliament, the party with 326 seats) - but the fact that it's in doubt has to be disappointing to the Tories.

After a debt crisis in Greece has people are talking - irresponsibly and hyperbolically, in my opinion - about the unravelling of the Euro, and the Tories, long the party of Euro- scepticism, aren't way in front?

After Labour holding power for 13 years and governing over the worst economic crisis since the War, and the Tories aren't walking all over them?

After souring public opinion about the wars and how Blair lied their nation into them, and the Tories aren't tonight taking a bow and forming a government?

After even their friends tired of Labour, as shown by the reliably red Guardian endorsing the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservatives didn't have this sewn up weeks ago?

What's shocking tonight is not that Labour are losing seats, possibly up to the triple digits. What's shocking is that, even with every possible advantage in an election cycle, the Conservative party wasn't able to capitalize. Might that be because Cameron, the Conservative leader, wasn't able to convince Britons that he was to be trusted with governance?

It's at least a part.

More on the results in the morning, but don't believe the hype of what you'll see in the headlines of the American newspapers. By all projections it will STILL be the case that the two left of center parties in UK life, the Liberal Democrats and Labour, will win over 50% of the vote. Cameron, whatever else Tories may make of him, is not the answer to their long drouth of leadership.

And Britain remains a center left nation.
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Gay bashing Baptist Preacher in Hookergate - Update

2010-05-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

Some weeks, the stories write themselves.

1. Dr. Rekers has claimed that he needed help with his luggage and that's why he went to Rentboy.com to find a companion for an otherwise solo ten day trip around Europe. He made Colbert's Alpha Dog of the Week.

2. The State of Arkansas, under GOP Presidential Hopeful Mike Hukabee, called Rekers to testify about how awful gay parents are for kids. His testimony was thrown out by judges, both at the county and State Supreme Court, as being biased, pseudo science, and one man's unsubstantiated opinion. He then sued the state for payment of $200,000 and eventually settled for $67,000 - for testimony that was declared useless. Nice use of taxpayer money, Rev. Huckabee.

From the Arkansas Leader:

The Arkansas Supreme Court concluded later that Rekers’ testimony was pointless and it declared Huckabee’s anti-gay rule unconstitutional. Rekers testifies as a scientific expert for states that adopt anti-gay laws. The states lose, but Rekers always takes in big fees. Rekers is supposed to be an expert in “conversion therapy,” the process of “curing” homosexuality.

Rekers upset his sponsors in Arkansas after the trial by demanding $200,000 for his expert services, which was more than Gov. Huckabee wanted to pay him. Rekers subsequently sued the state for $160,000 and eventually settled with the Department of Human Services. The taxpayers — that’s us — shelled out $60,000 to him for the privilege of being humiliated.

3. And NARTH has purportedly started to respond, sic's and all.

4. And for those keeping track at home, the Miami New Times has helpfully compiled a list of the top 10 outed homophobes.

Ah, George. Good luck with this one.

(Pic from NYDaily News, showing the good Reverand/ Doctor with his rentboy's profile pic.)

"But Jesus hung out with prostitutes, too!"

2010-05-05T15:38:00.000-07:00

Have you heard of the latest fallen (or as of this writing, “falling”) “Christian” activist, Dr. George Rekers? I had never heard of this man, but he is one of the two or three most influential Republican Christian homophobes out there. This man has spent the better part of three decades writing books about how evil gay people are, how you can pray away the gay, how you can direct your children sexually so that they grow up straight… and guess what we've just learned about Dr. Rekers?

Oh, come on, it’s too easy.

I’m not going to say he’s gay because that’s a social construct and one to which I suspect he doesn't ascribe, but he is certainly homosexually inclined. As reported in the Miami New Times (and caught by FB friend Michael Mowle – thanks Michael!), Dr. Rekers has just returned from a ten day European vacation with a rent boy. Literally – he found his young male companion on www.rentboy.com. And I'll let the Miami New Times handle what all one has to actively agree "by checking here" to get to escorts profiles on rentboy.com. And his Escort was on page TWO, so Dr. Rekers had to troll through (and I'm not being mean spirited, I mean this as in definition 2a, here) a LOT of ads to find the young "Lucien".

It's hysterical, or would be, if it weren't for the very real damage this awful man has inflicted on others.

He has written books, including “Growing up Straight: What Families Should Know About Sexuality;” think any poor gay kid wondering about sexual identity had a parent read that and use it to make his or her life a living hell? My money is on “yes.” And what about his public advocacy, and his involvement in the civil sphere? Dr. Rekers – and he has a PhD from UCLA – has worked to insinuate his peculiar brand of Bible-influenced, perverted “science” and “social science,” into public life. And more than that – as if ruining gay kids’ lives and eroding civil rights for gay folks wasn’t enough – he testified as an “expert” in both Florida, where he was paid $87,000 in taxpayer money as a witness for the state to keep a gay man from adopting two kids he had fostered for six years, and Arkansas, a state which he tried to bill $80,000 in taxpayer money and settled for $60,000 of taxpayer money, against the civil rights of gay people to adopt children, in an attempt to deny some children, likely straight children, a loving home in which to grow up.

And he did ALL of this while pursuing sex with guys.

What kind of mental knots did he have to tie himself into to believe in what he was doing? He hired a rentboy, literally, for a ten day vacation in Europe, while an officer of of NARTH, the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality. He cofounded, with James Dobson, the Family Research Council and works to cloak his vicious and insatiable homophobia through “science”, and yet he is at least bisexual.

How miserable must this poor bastard have been/ still be? I wonder if he believes his claim that he needed "help with his luggage due to a medical condition" and so he went to rentboy.com to find a luggage handler (c'mon... the jokes write themselves). I hope no charges are brought against his luggage handler (who has confirmed they met through the site) and through his actions Dr. Reker's doesn't ruin another young man's life.

As for Dr. Rekers - yup, an ordained Baptist minister - I hope his professional career is irreparably wounded, and he can stop directing his self loathing outward. Believe what you want to believe - even believe that the best way to find someone to help you with your luggage on a ten day solo European vacation is to go to page two of personals on rentboy.com, even if said luggage handler - WASN'T HANDLING THE LUGGAGE - but don't take whatever the hell you choose to believe, about yourselves or others, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and inject it venomously into the public sphere.

From starcasm.com (another website which picked up the story) a writer muses, when reading Dr. Reker’s defense of why he hired someone from rentboy.com to handle his luggage on a ten day (otherwise) solo trip to Europe:

About halfway through that and I would have thought “I bet this guy is gay,” if I wouldn’t have already heard about the whole Rentboy thing. I can’t believe guys like this believe what they believe.

Right? It all comes back to that, doesn’t it? What do we believe and why do we believe it?

In the latest New Yorker (the one with the black and white cover showing spring cleaning’s results at the curb, including a husband), James Surowiecki ascribes at least part of the financial meltdown to what Dr. Leon Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Festinger, a social psychologist, applied this label to the phenomenon of holding onto beliefs even when there is incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. We find cause and effect where there is none, we ignore cause and effect when it’s not convenient, we rewrite history, disavow earlier statements and explain things away. President Obama wasn’t born in the US, despite a newspaper birth announcement and a birth certificate showing that he was born in Hawai`i, for one example.

This happens in every arena of human life, and Festinger gave a social science framework to something I've long thought: people believe whatever the hell they want to believe.

I understand the impulse. For millenia, our ancestors lived in environments that tried to kill them. Wild animals and the spirits that animated them needed to be placated lest they kill any more members of the tribe, or change their migratory patterns so they couldn’t be hunted; the atmosphere needed to be reified and then worshipped so clouds would drop rain at the right times and in the right amounts; the volcano must be named and cared for so that she didn’t get angry and cover everything in lava. We wanted there to be some reason - or motivation, or nameable cause - for the things in our environment that just happened, and by creating spurious connections and then codifying them, we hoped to get control over our environment.

I’m a sports fan, so of course I get it. I have a (mostly) rational, atheist friend who acts as though his behavior can affect the outcomes of games. If his team is winning and he’s hot and opens a window, they better not start playing poorly – if they do, the window gets closed - he's affected the game. Never mind that he lives in Hawai`i and the game is being played at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, his actions somehow displeased the sports gods, or threw off sports karma, or, and this is a quote, “negatively affected the sports juju.” Until two years ago I was right there with him, and some weeks it takes a lot of self talk to wash my lucky Manning jersey during Colts season. On a rational level I understand that I don't affect the game. Of course I don't. How could I? But I want to believe that I do so I believe that I do.

In sports fans, it’s a nutty but ultimately kind of an endearing trait. In people in public policy roles, in leadership, in banking and finance, in the military, it’s insidious.

More on this story to come, inevitably. In the mean time, I'm going, in the spirit of taking out the plank in my own eye before I talk about foreign bodies in others' (ahem), to wash my "lucky jersey" every week, no matter Peyton's passing rating.

Keep it rational...
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Washed up

2010-05-03T06:30:00.000-07:00

I'd bought it to be a beach blanket, and it was already in the trunk. I saw it when I threw my bag in the trunk, my new orange blanket from Ikea with the unpronounceable Swedish name, as I left for school visits in San Luis Obisbo and Santa Barbara. On my way back to LA that day in 1999, I pulled off the 101 in the brilliant afternoon sunshine to hit the beach.

I took it down to the sand, threw it out, anchored it with my slippahs, and stretched out in the balmy sunshine. At the end of my reading material an hour later, I started to pack up, mindful of when I'd hit LA traffic, and that's when I saw it: big black gobs of goo on my feet! I was shocked - so shocked that it took me a while to realize what the big gobs of black, gooey stuff could be. I scrounged around for a stick and scraped off as much as I could, and then went into the surf to try and get the rest off. But it wouldn't come off! I kept stepping in more, and now as I looked it was everywhere. I'd rub my feet on rocks and with the stick to get the globs off, but my feet were stained, and no matter how much I scrubbed with sand and sea water, and no matter much kept coming off, there was still more. After about 20 minutes I declared my feet clean, but then I noticed my slippahs were covered - so I repeated the process and got as much off of them (new stick) as I could and put them back on, recontaminating the soles of my feet with what I couldn't really get off from the decks of my slippahs. I then shook out my blanket and saw the globs there! I shook out the sand, balled it up and trudged back up to my car, feeling violated.

Later at the Goleta Coffee Company for a post-beach fuel-up, I struck up a conversation with some locals, told them about the tar, and displayed my raw and rubbed-red feet, still stained. They confirmed my suspicions - it wasn't tar, it was crude oil. From a spill off the coast. In 1969, 30 years earlier.

Before I got home I stopped at a hardware store for turpentine, used my t-shirt as a rag to clean up my slippahs and my feet, and tried to get the worst of it out of my beach blanket. Finally I realized the only thing to do was to cut it out of the material so it wouldn't keep spreading onto other surfaces, so I did (right). My trip to the beach had cost me a t-shirt, a can of turpentine, a few hours of cleaning time, and a hole in my new Ikea blanket. Despite my best efforts, I suspect someone at Avis had a helluva time getting the brake and gas pedals clean.

All this from an oil spill that happened thirty years earlier.

What's going to happen in the Gulf of Mexico? What's going to be the effect in thirty years on the beaches of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and yes, Florida and Texas? What's going to happen to the fisheries and shrimp grounds and to all of the people who depend upon them for their livelihoods? I heard President Obama say today that BP is going to be on the hook for the cost, but what cost? In 30years is BP going to pay for a beach-goer's turpentine, t-shirt and beach blanket?

There is simply no way to pay for the costs of an oil spill like the one happening right now 5000 feet below sea level on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. The costs are incalculable. And until all the costs - ALL the costs - of a petroleum based economy are captured at the consumer level, then we will make irrational decisions about our energy consumption, and keep buying artificially cheap gas and the cars that burn it.

When I pay $3.12 for a gallon of gas up the street at the Shell station, that does not cover the costs of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or the defense budget it takes to ensure enough supply, or the long term effects that my using that gas will have on a warming environment, or the asthma of a child in Long Beach who is growing up downwind of the harbor and who breathes in bunker fuel exhaust from an ocean tanker bringing in raw crude oil to the refineries in Wilmington.

What is the real cost of a gallon of gas? It's nearly mpossible to calculate.

When President Obama earlier this year signalled that he was going to open parts of Alaska, the Atlantic seabed, and additional areas in the Gulf to oil production, I was deeply disappointed and I thought strongly that it was the wrong policy - but I understood the motivation. What are we supposed to do? We burn the stuff, and we burn more than we have. What are we supposed to do? What's the solution? Use less and switch the hell off of it before we destroy the planet, bankrupt ourselves in favor of some of the worst people in the world, and run out, sure. But even if we all decided tomorrow that was the right course to pursue - and we won't, but even if we did - it will take decades to get there.

When I had that experience back in '99, I was annoyed (and for several days after I kept that tshirt and turpentine handy, as there was a lot of "how did oil get THERE?!") but smug. I didn't own a car, so I was not part of the problem. Never mind that I sure used jet fuel, that I rented a car for work purposes for over half the weeks of the year that didn't run on fairy dust, that I bought consumer goods and foods made all over the world that were flown or shipped in to my local store - I was not part of the problem.

I was wrong then, and my smugness embarrasses me in hindsight. The worse thing is that I'm an even greater part of the problem now. I drive everywhere. My bike got stolen and I almost never take the train anymore, even though it goes to just a few blocks from work. I still fly an awful lot - I'm dating someone in Georgia, for the gods' sake!

I remember feeling a little sick after I realized what I'd stepped in on that beach in 1999, and that it had washed up from thirty years before. I wondered how many decades it would take for that washed up oil to really be "cleaned up." After I'm gone, it's safe to say, is one answer.

By the time hurricane season comes, in just twenty eight days, with possible onshore storm surges pushing Gulf seawater - and crude oil - miles into the delicate estuaries along the coast, and winds of more than 70 miles an hour lifting Gulf seawater spray and foam - and crude oil - and blowing it miles and miles inland, maybe the spill will have been "cleaned up." Maybe by then the leak will have been stanched, and the 200,000 gallons of crude oil currently shooting into the Gulf everyday from an oil deposit another 18,000 feet below the sea floor will have been greatly diminished, or stanched all together. Maybe it will be a hurricane season like 1980, when no storms hit the current spill area.

But I'm not particularly hopeful.

There's no question that it's the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast residents who will pay a disproportionate share of the damage, whatever damages turn out to be, and that my $3.12 a gallon isn't going to begin to cover the cost. And all that crude oil, floating on the water - getting stirred up by winds, suffocating even more of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems - means that a lot more than crude oil is going to be all washed up.

Karl Rove and I Agree

2010-05-02T04:02:00.001-07:00

Here's something I'd never anticipated when I started writing BLC: Karl Rove and I are on the same side of an issue. We both agree that bashing illegal immigrants is bad for Republicans.

In a great piece by Frank Rich in the New York Times, Rich writes:

The one group of Republicans that has been forthright in criticizing the Arizona law is the Bush circle: Jeb Bush, the former speechwriter Michael Gerson, the Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, the adviser Mark McKinnon and, with somewhat more equivocal language, Karl Rove. McKinnon and Rove know well that Latino-bashing will ultimately prove political suicide in a century when Hispanic Americans are well on their way to becoming the largest minority in the country and are already the swing voters in many critical states.

As I wrote in a piece two days ago, Arizona's law could well lead to that state joining the more liberal Pacific states as bedrock democratic electoral votes - as "givens" in presidential elections.

For sure, Arizona will be in play, and the Hispanic bashing xenophobes of the Tea Party and the GOP could deliver other states as well.

Colorado went for Bill Clinton but not for Gore or Kerry - Hispanics helped deliver it to President Obama in 2008. In 1980 it was 12% Hispanic; in 1990, 13%; in 2000, 17%; in 2009 it was projected at 21% - more than enough in a state with strong environmental ethics and white, educated liberals for a strong coalition of Democratic voters to coalesce.

Nevada went to Clinton twice and then for President Bush; the Hispanic population there went from 7% in 1980 to 20% in 2000, and the Census has projected it to be 26% in 2009.

Florida, that bastion of electoral regularity, has moved from 9% Hispanic in 1980 to a projected 21% in 2008. From an analysis on President Obama's inroads with Hispanics, which noted that Mr. Obama won the Hispanic vote in Florida for a Democrat for the first time ever:

In Florida, Obama won 57 percent of the Hispanics on Tuesday, compared to 42 percent for McCain... By comparison, President Bush won 55 percent of the state's Hispanic vote to John Kerry's 44 percent in 2004. Polls indicate the state's Hispanic vote may now be divided. On one side are conservative older Cuban Americans, who vote reliably Republican. On the other are younger Cuban Americans coupled with an expanding number of non-Cuban Hispanics, who tend to lean Democratic.

"Younger Cuban Americans" are joining their younger Mexican American and Irish American and American American generational members in voting Democratic.

And eventually, states like North Carolina and Georgia, with 5%, and even Kansas, with 7%, may come to have Hispanic populations large enough that canny Democratic candidates could forge winning coalitions. It's not a given, of course, and President Obama and Democratic leaders need to show some courage and get some meaningful work done on immigration reform. But if the Tea Partiers continue to fight a hopeless rearguard action against the changing face of American demographics by vilifying immigrants, then maybe a Democratic President Rodriguez or Garcia or Martinez will be here sooner than we think.

Si, se puede!

¡Gracias, Arizona!

2010-04-30T12:28:00.000-07:00

Oh, Arizona, gracias indeed for passing AB 1070, a/k/a the "Permanent Democratic Majority Bill." I don't mean to be glib - it's pretty bad. And on a personal, visceral level, I know exactly how it feels to wake up in this country with fewer civil rights than you had when you went to bed because a majority of your neighbors, or a majority of your elected officials, felt you didn't deserve them.

AB 1070, if you've been living under a rock (or, fair enough, outside of the US) for the last week, requires state cops to do racial profiling, mandates illegal arrests, puts thousands of Arizonans in fear of illegal arrests, and puts the state on the hook for future untold millions in legal costs. AB 1070 was passed by a craven and bilious state legislature and signed by a deeply unpopular governor who needed a lifeline.

Sound familiar, California?

And California has not until very recently been such a Democratic stronghold. From 1967 to 1999 we had sixteen consecutive years, and twenty four of thirty two years, of Republican governors. This was a purple state, and one in which Republicans consistently won statewide elections and had long had at least one of our two US Senators from the GOP.

Until Pete Wilson.

I was a frequent visitor to California in the early 1990's, and I remember the deeply unpopular Governor Wilson trying to survive. I remember reading that his approval rating at one point was in the low 20's, but I can't find that sourced now and I don't trust my memory enough to put that as a fact. I did find a reference here to Wilson being 20 points behind his Democratic opponent in 1993, a year before the general election. How did he come back? He ran on a platform of flogging anti-immigrant sentiment up and down the state to get Prop 187 passed.

Later overturned by the courts as being illegal, Prop 187 might sound familiar to anyone reading about the Arizona law. From the USC Libraries, Prop 187 required that:

1.All law enforcement agents who suspect that a person who has been arrested is in violation of immigration laws must investigate the detainee's immigration status, and if they find evidence of illegality they must report it to the attorney general of California, and to the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).
2.Local governments are prohibited from doing anything to impair the fulfillment of this requirement.
3.The attorney general must keep records on all such cases and make them available to any other government entity that wishes to inspect them.
4.No one may receive public benefits until they have proven their legal right to reside in the country.
5.If government agents suspected anyone applying for benefits of being illegal immigrants, the agents must report their suspicions in writing to the appropriate enforcement authorities.
6.Emergency medical care is exempted, as required by federal law, but all other medical benefits have the requirements stated above.
7.Primary and secondary education is explicitly included.

Sound familiar?

And it worked! Wilson came roaring back on the backs of fed up white voters who felt that the "illegals" were the reason that their taxes were going up, and that if only we got them off the state's "very generous welfare system" then all would be right in the world. This was the period of "Falling Down" (1993), the angry white man movie with Michael Douglas. Wilson was going to be tough - tough on crime and tough on illegals. And he was. He won his second term for Governor, but he lost the state for a generation - and counting - for the Republican party.

I guess xenophobia and race baiting cloud one's ability to do math. Hispanics as a percentage of California's population in 2000 was 32%. In 1990 it was 26%. That is more growth both in real numbers and in percentage terms than any other demographic group in the state over the same period.

Arizona's population projections? From a 2000 population of 5.1 million it's projected to grow to 10.7 million by 2030. In 1990, Arizona was 18% Hispanic; in 2000 it was 25% Hispanic and 20% Mexican American alone. I'm not a demographer or a math genius, and even I can see where the train is heading.

Vilifying 20% and infuriating 25% of your state's population is not a great way to get elected as a party when you've got white liberals in the state as well. In the South, fine, you can get away with centuries-old patterns of disenfranchisement at a statewide level because there hasn't been enough migration and capital flow to counterbalance the entrenched old white voting blocks (though this has started to change in Virginia and North Carolina); in the West? It won't work.

Arizona will continue to have the same number of senators, of course, but they might in another cycle or two be two senators with D's behind their names, instead of the two R's they have now. How will Republicans look 40% of the state's voters in the eye and say "No, not you, we didn't mean you when we angrily paraded up and down our state saying that we needed to arrest people who had accents and were, um, browner than us and send them back, we meant those other folks with the accents who are browner than us."

And by 2030 there will be two, or possibly three, or possibly even four new US House districts in Arizona. Which direction do you think they will lean?

To vilify and attempt to criminalize large portions of your own population is not only mean spirited, anti-Christian, illegal and ineffective (if your real goal is to "protect the border"), it's the surest proven way to make your political party irrelevant at the statewide level. So, Arizona, by 2016 at the latest I would like to welcome you to the "West Coast automatic Democratic electoral votes" Club.

And Nevada, we have room for you, too.

Men and women in uniform less Republican - by a lot

2010-04-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

Did you see this?

According to a survey of 1800 active duty reported on in the Army Times, there has been a huge drop since 2004 among those serving who identify as Republican. Then? 60%. Now? 41%.

From 2008 to 2009 alone those surveyed identifying themselves as Republican dropped 9%. It's not as though they are identifying as Democrats - not yet anyway - most are unaffiliated or "independent."

This strikes me as a very significant development, and it makes perfect sense. Most of those who serve in uniform are young - shockingly young, and if you've travelled recently then you know what I mean - and the Republican Party has had a very hard time holding on to the youth vote. Current young people don't really seem to care about the old wedge issues of identity politics, and they are less likely to be afraid of otherness.

Also, since the the deception of Republican leadership has put those serving in harm's way for spurious, fabricated, and/or political reasons, they know first hand the cost of being Republican.

I can't imagine that the expansion of military benefits led by Democratic leaders has hurt, but I suspect that's secondary.

And I can't help but wonder, if the shift were in the other direction (from Democratic to unaffiliated), how much we'd be hearing about this? Do you think that some talking hairpieces over at Faux would actually explode flogging this news item?

Oh, Ricky...

2010-04-05T22:26:00.000-07:00

As has been well documented, I have among the world's worst gaydar. In part it's because I don't really believe in it. Implicit in the concept of gaydar, the ability to tell who is or isn't gay, is that there are ways that gayness manifests itself outwardly - that there are tells by the way a person dresses or acts or looks at you or makes out with you... well, that last one, okay, but the rest? Really? What year is it?

After Stevie and I broke up, I had a rebound relationship with this dude Tony. We met at a sports bar, started talking, he lived in my neighborhood, we staggered home together after being over served, I mentioned "my ex-boyfriend, Stevie" early in the night, he told me he thought I was cute, and we took it from there. He later told me "if you hadn't told me I wouldn't have known you were queer." Might have been pillow talk, but I know that if he hadn't told me, I wouldn't have known.

Embedded in me saying this, there's an assumption so opaque that it's almost invisible: by saying that he and I wouldn't have known without telling each other, I'm acknowledging that there is a way to tell, and thus that there can be "gaydar." Further, saying that we needed to tell each other is to make a claim for ourselves to a non-stereotypically gay presentation. Our location, speech, dress, way of moving through space, interests we discussed - all placed us outside of "gay" in some way, so that we had to disclose our sexual alignment verbally to claim it. And despite my intellectual efforts against it, I would say that there was some pride - that we "passed" was seen as a good thing, or a better thing than "not passing."

I recognized that temptation to pride early in my coming out process, and I tried to be vigilant against it, recognizing it for what it is: divisive, oppressive, laden with gender normativity and value judgment. The fact is, though, that it takes constant vigilance to resist the temptation and to remain aware of the constant flood of messages that bombard us about gender roles and what is and isn't desirable, and I'm lazier now that I used to be. And in some ways I'm less out today than I was in the 90's in Denver or Chicago, when I wouldn't date someone who wouldn't hold my hand wherever the hell I wanted to, who wasn't fully out, who didn't have an integrated life. I have fallen out of some of the habits of earlier decades, in part because they are no longer necessary, but in part because I'm less cognizant of the need, and less surrounded by people who challenge me.

Shortly after I came out in undergrad I pinned a button on my backpack that read "Don't presume I'm straight" because it used to piss me off - this assumption making and distinction drawing. I wanted to reject the notion that "straight acting" was more desirable, or better, or even a thing, or that because I presented a certain way you felt fine telling faggot jokes around me.

But why am I like this? Is this how I really am, or at some level is my behavior formed by reacting against the straight need to be comfortable with a certain type of gay male, and its artifice?

Stereotype: All gay people are x.
Reaction 1: I'm gay, so I have to be x.
Reaction 2: I'm not x, so therefore I'm not gay. Whew!

Reaction 1 never made any sense to me; I wasn't x. (Who IS really, though? Oh, yeah. That kid on "Glee." And that kid in School of Rock. And every male character on "Will and Grace." And that character when a straight lead needs a gay best friend to help them laugh or shop or pick out clothes. Lazy, offensive, one dimensional depictions of gay men - rich, white, shallow, funny, and femme.)

I can't help but wonder if I love football so much as a reaction to stereotype, and that I let straight people's gay stereotypes define me even in a counter-typical way - in any way at all. I don't think that's the case, but it's impossible to test the null, and it's certainly possible. I've read enough biographies and met enough gay ex-Marines to know that there is a type of gay male who on some level tries not to be gay by doing the most stereotypically un-gay thing he can think of.

And in that pursuit or that action, the power is still ceded beyond himself - ourselves - to those to whom we give permission to determine what is the "right" way to talk, to dress, to move through space. The hegemony of cultural types and normative expectations is just that - hegemonic. By either revolting against it or acquiescing to our role within it, we are acknowledging its presence and power.

But I don't know how to avoid it - it's hegemonic, after all. It's foolish to pretend we live in a vacuum, or that our environment doesn't impact us. So what do we do with the normed expectations that are instilled in us from birth, once we begin to see them? What do we do when we reach adolescence and begin to understand that we don't fit - fundamentally can't fit - our proscribed roles?

As an adolescent I dreamt about playing football, and started watching and going to games every weekend. I started memorizing stats, scores and rosters to talk with other kids about. Why? How informed was that choice to follow football as a gay adolescent? From whence came my motivation? Is it coincidental that it started at the same time as I began to understand my inability to be who was expected of me? Unanswerable, unfortunately.

I think of this while thinking about Ricky Martin.

I was going to excoriate him for his cowardice and express my disappointment in his delay. I thought that maybe he is doing the best he can - but on further reflection, that doesn't pass the sniff test. I don't buy it. I try to be compassionate with my gay brothers (movement, not biological - and I have learned that the experiences of gay men and gay women don't have tremendous overlap, and I don't want to speak here for lesbians) and to be patient with their coming out processes. I know all humans have their own paths. I know that sometimes people come out when they aren't ready and that usually goes badly. I know that some people come out in anger. I know that some men are too weak or too wounded, and they can't by themselves get to a place where they are okay with being gay - they need those they love to make it okay for them.

But I continually come back to: dammit, grow a pair!

I made the conscious decision to come out; I did the work and I paid a price. And people who had the conversations after I did with the people with whom I had spoken had an easier time because I blazed the trail. It was 1988, 89, 90 and 91 in Milwaukee - you don't think it was hard sometimes? Or that when I walked straight people through their questions and their discomfort, for as long as they needed, that it didn't make it easier for those same straight people's little brothers, or roommates, or future co-workers? It was, and it did. And I knew it was a political act when I did it.

I made the decision - scared and after much deliberation, but I made a deliberate, conscious, political decision to tell my friends and then my straight roommates, to tell my mom and siblings and dad, to wear a button on my backpack, to hold my boyfriend's hand when I wanted to, to bring up an ex-boyfriend early in every conversation with a new person in my life so that if they didn't like gay folk we could move beyond it early, to put the pride coalition - made up - on my resume so that anyone thinking of hiring me would know, to come out in interviews and ask if it was a problem, to write about it in philosophy and theology papers, to challenge professors to do better than the lazy characterizations of gay folks they had been using in their lectures, to write letters to the editor of every paper I read when they needed to be written, to demand that the institutions for which I worked extend me equal rights and protections.

Gay people who say, "I don't feel like I have to go around announcing it to everyone," are usually so scared or so wounded that they don't realize how offensive they are being to those of us who are out. And it sucks they feel that scared and have been that wounded, it does. But the reality is that they are contributing to their own oppression by remaining invisible - the straight people who want us to feel like telling the truth about our lives is "flaunting" win, in that case. I try to react from compassion and not from crazy, and I think I usually succeed. But people ceding permission to others for how they live their lives, and people acquiescing to the institutions and power structures that says their relationship with the person they love isn't good enough to be named, are contributing to their own oppression.

And I am unwilling to do that. And I am willing to call you on it when you do that.

Don't those closeted queer folk realize that EVERY straight person goes around announcing how straight they are? On NPR Sunday, a radio announcer on Marketplace Money mentioned her husband, totally nonchalantly, where it was not at all needed for the advice she was giving a caller on purchasing a new car. I'm confident she did so without realizing that it was a political act because for her it isn't - it's so opaque it's invisible, her laying claim to the majority and the power implicit in that straight privilege. They don't even realize they're privileged, most of them. (Just like many males don't realize they're privileged. Just like many wealthy people don't understand the implications and depth of their privilege. Just like many white people - gott im himmel, try to point out to white person that he or she is privileged! And wealthy straight white males? You better have some time on your hands.)

People make a decision about coming out.

I get that some people live in a place where coming out requires a much higher price than what I paid. I don't live in a theocracy where I can be openly discriminated against; I don't work in a state that offers no civil protections for gay folk or where I could be fired for coming out; I don't live in a home where I could be beaten; I don't live in fear of losing my housing; I don't serve in a military branch from which I could be discharged with no pension or benefits. I am incredibly lucky. I know.

But people make a decision about coming out. And Ricky Martin, by waiting until he was pop-culturally irrelevant and until a sea-change on queer issues had occurred in Latin America over the last decade as they grew to be pretty tolerant of queer folk, missed the opportunity to be brave, and to be a leader. He is not someone who had to fear for losing his job, or losing his house, or losing citizenship status or being killed. He was insulated by money and power in a way that made it a small risk. And it's still a risk he didn't take.

And that is disappointing, as it is for people anywhere who still, in 2010, choose to live their lives in the closet. You can do better. Better late than never, but you can do better.

What it costs (Part 3) / Why I'm a liberal (Part 2)

2010-04-03T23:16:00.000-07:00

This wasn't originally going to be part three, but I read something in the paper this morning that I found so extraordinary that I had to comment on it. From the SJ Mercury News, here's the headline:

"Feds: Homes with Chinese drywall must be gutted."

And here’s the story.

During the 2000’s, drywall was imported from China that was found to be tainted. Toxic. Poisonous. From the Christian Science Monitor, one homeowner who moved into a house with the tainted product reported a stench of rotten eggs, and worse:

...mirrors that corroded around the edges, drains that rusted on the baths, pitted faucets, the television, computer, dishwasher, coffee pot, telephones, and air-conditioning system that all inexplicably broke down. Even the treasured gold-dipped necklace she wore around her neck turned black. Then there were the headaches, throat and sinus troubles.

Seems that Chinese drywall "contained strontium sulfide, which gives a rotten egg odor when moistened and reacts with hydrogen in the air to take on corrosive powers capable of eating through metals and electrical wires." And human tissue, like lungs and throats and eyes.

So. Over the last decade we imported an estimated 500 million pounds of drywall from China that was inadequately - or never - inspected. It turned out to be toxic. According to a great piece of reporting in the Sarasota, Florida, Herald Tribune, most of it ended up in Florida (graph and maps in PDF here, story here,), but the second biggest shipment - enough for 6,500 homes - went to post-Katrina New Orleans. Twelve states in all got shipments of the toxic drywall, and all told it was enough to build 61,000 homes.

I had two quick reactions. One was: We import DRYWALL!? What are we doing?

I worked construction with my brother one summer, and I have carried drywall around. I know from personal experience how heavy it is - one 4 x 8 foot sheet 1/2 inch thick is about 54 pounds. How can it possibly be more economical for very heavy drywall to be made in China, shipped from drywall factories to a port, loaded onto a ship, sailed 7,251 miles, say, from Hong Kong to the port of Long Beach, unloaded onto a train (or worse, a flatbed truck), and trucked or shipped across the country to Florida, than it is to make it somewhere in the United States? How big is that carbon footprint? How is it possible that this makes economic, environmental or ethical sense? According to the Christian Science Monitor story, from 2001 to 2007 we bought 500 million pounds of drywall from China. (Other sources also give the amount purchased as 500 million pounds but give a time window of 2004-2008 or "from 2006.") That’s 250,000 tons of drywall! Every Prius ever sold couldn't make up for the climate footprint of one laden tanker ship burning bunker fuel crossing the Pacific with a few tons of drywall in its guts.

Can it really be cheaper to do this? Well, of course you need to ask: "cheaper for whom." When we as consumers make decisions in the marketplace to save a buck, at least we have the power to make the choice, and we have to live with the consequences. In this case, those making the purchase have no motive except profit margin, and they don't have to live with the result.

Which as I thought about it brought me to my second reaction: This is why we need government! Okay, "invisible handers," TEA Partiers who think government should be dismantled, Grover Norquist who wants to get government so small he could drown it in his bathtub - why don't you all go live with the results of inadequate oversight and regulation?

Who was in charge while this was happening? Republicans. The Small Government Party. The Party who thinks we should just let the market regulate itself. The party who was so busy keeping us safe from fanatically religious Al Qaeda by invading rigorously secular Iraq that they couldn't keep poisoned goods from swamping our markets and ending up in American homes.

You see the pictures of the blackened pipes and faulty appliances due to the drywall and you start to get a sense of the scope of the problem. You read about these people in homes they can't live in because it will make them sick, and that they can't move out of because they can't afford it, with no recourse in many cases, and it makes you feel so bad for them that you stop thinking "well, it serves you right, you small government fetishizing, anti-own-self-interest voting, Republican traitor staters!" You really feel bad for them. And even in the reddest districts there are some Democratic voters.

What can these homeowners do? Some developers, to their credit, are trying to do the right thing by paying for the homeowners to move out while the poisoned products are removed from their homes. Or their homes are bulldozed and rebuilt. (Literally - some homes are so contaminated they need to be taken down to the ground by haz-mat teams.) Who's paying for it? Chinese manufacturers? Riiiight. Not so much. I'm sure the TEA Partiers, if they had to live in these houses, would be dead set against any government recourse and against any additional government oversight at ports to inspect imports - to be intellectually consistent, I mean.

China continues to manipulate their currency so that their exports are artificially cheaper - up to 40% cheaper by some estimates. And we keep buying them, or buying products with Chinese exports already in them. And we keep getting poisoned. Again, from the Christian Science Monitor:

Toxic baby toys, tainted animal feed and toothpaste, hazardous high-chairs, and infant formula contaminated with melamine have all been the focus of product recalls or warnings over the past 18 months.

All from China. We need to think about where the stuff we buy is made, and we think to think about where the stuff that goes into the stuff we buy is made.

And once again, we maybe could think a little bit more about what we save when we save a buck.

She blinded me with... science?

2010-04-02T11:38:00.001-07:00

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Why is it that in all of the doomsday movies it's always a mad scientist who goes off the rails and cooks up plans to conquer the world? Rubbish. You don't read about a marine biologist who hears Darwin talking to her, telling her to murder her husband and eat her sister, do you? A scientist, if he or she hears voices, is likely to do the rational thing and seek medical attention, or take their meds, or talk themselves out it. They are trained in rationality, and know that when they hear voices that there is a rational explanation. What mad scientists have bombed subways, or mutilated or killed other scientists who held differing opinions about their fields of study? What scientists, mad or otherwise, have declared a fundamental truth about the world based on no evidence at all and then said "Furthermore, those who do not agree with my wholly fabricated version of the truth are lesser than those who do, and deserve to be dispossessed, or killed, or banned from my libraries and schools!"

Doesn't happen. Nope, it shouldn't be "mad scientists" in those movies, it should be mad priests.

The purveyors of religion create a context for irrationality. Once you come to believe that a made up man (and yes, he's always talked about as male) in the sky has control over your destiny, and that this made up man cares fervently what you do with your body, your brain, your money, and your life, what's to stop you from believing in everything, or anything?

This comes to mind this week as a "Christian" militant group - and think about that for a second - decided that the way to bring about transformational political change was to murder a cop and then ambush his funeral cortege. On their website, prominently, right there when you go to their site, is this: "Preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive."

Find me a parallel in science and with scientists. Go ahead. I'll wait. (Tuneless whistling...) Right.

Jesus, the dude who 2000 years ago said some powerful stuff about the meek inheriting the earth, about taking the plank out of your own eye before judging the splinter in your neighbor's eye, about the peacemakers being blessed and "Sons of God..." - can't be down with this kinda thing. Murdering cops? You know why cops, of course - cops are evidently tools of the government plan for a new world order, which is part of a plan to usher in the anti-Christ. Right? It's laughable.

How DO you go from peacemakers being blessed to killing cops? Because theology, unlike science, is made up. Yes, Jesus lived, and yes, there are historical records of his life and some consensus on what he was about and what he said, but the reality is that the Bible is oral tradition, and oral tradition, as anyone who has ever had a Thanksgiving dinner with relatives knows, lends itself to mutability.

That's why only two Gospels talk about Jesus' birth. You'd think something that important would be worthy of note by all four of them, no? That's why there is a fourteen generation difference between Matthew and Luke when it comes to Jesus' geneology. That's why the nastier parts of the old testament - the parts in which men sleep with their daughters (straight people! Honestly...), in which women get stoned (and not that kind, sadly) for adultery, and have slaves - get ignored. So all those crazed people who talk about how gay folk are going to hell because its in the bible advocate for public stoning of adulterers, you know, to be consistent.

Right. That's the point - religion is internally inconsistent, and lacking a central doctrinal authority, which only the Catholics have and we all see how that's working out - you can make it believe whatever you want it to believe. Want to keep people of African descent as slaves? Feel free - they have the mark of Ham, and are therefore deserving of being enslaved. Want to start a militia for Christ? Go ahead - all the stuff about Jesus being a peacemaker can be thrown out the window if you want to believe in one verse, where he says, according to Matthew, "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." There, you see? I should train in the woods, murder cops and try to overthrow the legitimately elected government. Jesus told me to.

Religion - with all of its various "interpretations," and agendae, and we-believe-this-part-of-the-"Divine Word of God"-but-not-THIS-part, and internal inconsistencies, can mean whatever the hell you want it to mean.

And I'll be publish a retraction the next time some millionaire scientist is caught caching weapons and diabolically planning to murder a cop to prevent the coming of the anti-Darwin.

Until then, I have to say that I'm sorry, Mr. Dolby, but I find it far more likley to be blinded by religion.
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BLC Editor's Note - new fiction blog

2010-04-01T20:16:00.000-07:00

Because my fiction writing is so different than so much of what I put up on brensleftcoast, I've started a new blog for just that - fiction.

The web address is: http://blcfiction.blogspot.com/
I'll link to it from here.

I've taken down Will's and Genny's stories, and posted them, along with Dray's, at the new site. I'll keep the memoirs and political and sports and whatever other random things I feel need commented upon here.

Hopefully this division of labor will help improve the quality and production of each.

Thanks for reading!
Bren

Items in the News -

2010-03-26T23:24:00.000-07:00

No, not THAT item in the news - here are some other things I've seen that have been interesting over the past week or so.

1. This is big. President Obama has made 15 recess appointments to overcome GOP obstructionism in the Senate, with nods to GLBT Americans with a gay Georgetown University professor appointed to the EEOC, and especially to Labor with two appointments to a stymied National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In what the NYTimes is calling "A muscular show," Mr. Obama is perhaps signalling that he knows that it's futile to attempt to reason with a minority party hell bent on thwarting his every move, and perhaps he should use the executive power that he has, and the Congressional majorities he has, while he has them. It is simply unbelievable that 15 months into his presidency with large Dem margins in both chambers that he has not done more in this vein. Perhaps the health care "debate" showed Mr. Obama that the lying and screaming elements on the right cannot be reasoned with, that the reasonable Republicans - Ray La Hood, Mr. Simpson and the women from Maine - are all he's got in the way of bipartisan working relationships, and that stuff needs to get done. Here's hoping.

2. Iceland has outlawed its sex industry, for feminist reasons. As reported in the Guardian, under the headline "Iceland: the world's most feminist country," a grass roots effort by women's groups and the support of the out lesbian prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir (which has to be the coolest name ever, especially considering she is the first out head of state in the world) to reduce sexual violence against women and sex trafficking has made it illegal "...for any business to profit from the nudity of its employees."

Given that gender has a power dimension, and that male objectification of women leads to violence and victimization, I understand the need for the law. Balancing that against the core value of liberty, however, is difficult. As a feminist ally I absolutely support those measures that reduce victimization of women; however, as a gay male I am deeply suspicious of state efforts to regulate sexual behavior. Discuss.

3. Oh, the Catholic Church. In a piece in the L.A. Times, Tim Rutten, one of my favorite Times writers, describes how the Church's response to the latest wave of sexual abuse scandals has shown they haven't learned a whole lot over the past scandal-filled decade. For those not keeping up at home, when the current Pope was still just Archbishop Ratzinger of Munich (and acutely focused on hunting down doctrinal errors - and, yes, predictably, gay folk), he was evidently too busy to handle "personnel matters." That is what his defenders are euphemistically calling the response to sexually predatory priests who, in Germany as in the United States, got bounced from parish to parish under Ratzinger's rule. "Personnel matters." That's nice. Ratzinger DID have time, in 1981, to notice and punish a priest for saying Mass at a peace rally, but DIDN'T have time, in 1980, to notice or punish a priest who was transferred to a parish in his diocese despite a record of child abuse. From the NYT:

"Vatican experts say there is little evidence that Benedict spent much time investigating more than 200 cases of 'problem priests' in the diocese, with issues including alcohol abuse, adultery and, now under the microscope, pedophilia."

So now that this has come to light, what has been the Church's response? Pastoral care? Reaching out to the victims? Heh. Yeah, right. It's two fold - one, blame the media, and two, as Rutten puts it, it's a "everybody-is-responsible-so-nobody-is-to-blame defense." And it's disgusting.

I had excellent teachers - both religious and lay - throughout my 16 years of formal Catholic education. They were inherently decent, humane, intelligent people who taught me to think critically and for myself, to question authority, and to work for justice. I never came close to experiencing any form of abuse from any priest or nun in my life. I'm very lucky in that regard, I know, and I'm grateful for it. I do remember one conversation with my religion teacher in high school, Fr. O'Keeffe, a mentor who came to be a friend, when he said (and I'm paraphrasing here, 25 years later) that many priests buy into the "cult of the priesthood" and begin to feel entitled. Some men by personality choose the profession for exactly these reasons, to be exalted in a way their natural talents couldn't achieve for them. Some choose the profession as a way to hide from their demons of personal guilt, and shame over their drinking, sexual proclivities, and/or their inability to be successful, or their fear of not being successful, with personal relationships. Not all, of course, or even most, but some. Some. And you'd have to be a deaf and dumb pig not to have seen that. And those in control of the institution not only looked the other way, in many cases, but nurtured that cult of the priesthood for their own self-aggrandizement and as a recruiting tool. To now pretend that they have no culpability for it is beyond comprehension. I repeat - it's disgusting.

4. From the science news, twenty five komodo dragons were born in captivity in Indonesia, as reported in the Singapore Straits Times. The endangered species (pictured below) is down to 2500 living animals in the world, so 25 in one go is pretty significant. The babies were 2.8 to 4.2 ounces, and significantly cuter, like most species, in their current form than they will be when they grow up (right). New research has shown that their bites are fatal because they have an anti-coagulant agent in their saliva that causes their victims to bleed out. Nasty way to go. (Their natural habitat is limited to a few islands in Indonesia, so you should be okay.)

Items in the news -

2010-03-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

1. Relating to a previous entry, here's evidence via the Singapore Straits Times that maybe someone in Congress does have a spine when it comes to China's currency manipulation:

'When Premier Wen said that China's currency is not overvalued two days ago, that was the last straw and here we are to tell them we are going to force you to do it - plain and simple,' said Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer as he unveiled the legislation at a news conference.

Finally!

2. And in another bit of news that references the same previous blog post, President Obama has announced a new initiative to increase US exports as a means to strengthen the economy and increase jobs. (I'm not going to take all the credit for these two items appearing the week after I wrote about these issues, but if you read it here on Bren'sLeftCoast then you read it here first.)

3. In a headline that really doesn't need a lot of add'l context, from the Times UK comes this:

Cardinal Schönborn says celibacy partly to blame for clerical sex abuse

I know, you're all shocked. What is interesting is that this observation is evidently from a conservative Austrian Cardinal who has the ear of the Pope. Nothing will come of it, of course, despite the fact that priestly celibacy isn't dogma, wasn't practiced in the Church until Augustine's time at the earliest, wasn't required in the Church until the Second Lateran Council in 1139, and didn't really become broad practice until 1322. Whatever. It's all made up anyway, but it's fascinating to me how some parts of the made up stuff are stickier than others.

(One favorite? When I was a kid, if I didn't go to Mass on New Year's Day and then got hit by a bus, I was going to go to hell - it was a Holy Day of Obligation, and not to go was a mortal sin. Nowadays, however, if I were to skip Mass on New Year's Day AND it fell on a Saturday or a Monday, then I wouldn't be committing a sin; IF it falls on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday and I skipped, well, then, I'd be sinning. In the U.S. But not in Australia. I'm not making this up, but wow, they sure are.)

4. Elections have consequences, item a.) - The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ("CDC") have a new head, and he's, gasp, actually a person of science. From the NYT comes an article detailing how Dr. Thomas R. Frieden has restored science and scientific methods - and austerity - to the CDC, imbuing it with a sense of purpose and getting rid of the non-scientific (personnel) and the frivolous (swivel desk chairs with cup holders in conference rooms) approved by former President Bush.

5. Elections have consequences, item b.) Did you know that in the Doomsday Scenario that our Sec'y of Defence would be incapacitated, former President Bush changed the order of succession so that instead of going to the Army Chief it went to someone under Rumsfeld? I try to keep up on things, and I had no idea. There were so many outrages under former President Bush that it was impossible to keep track. Well, President Obama has fixed it. From the San Jose Mercury News (which I'm not happy with, but I read...), comes this:

Obama's little-noticed March 1 executive order reverses President George W. Bush's doomsday plan, which bumped the service secretaries and elevated the most loyal advisers to the defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld.

Doomsday Plan - so what would we do if the top layer of our government were to be wiped out. And former President Bush, in changing standing policy, booted the Sec'y of the Army from the #3 spot to #6 - and elevated Rumsfeld's lackey, a Mr. Cambone, to #3. From the NYTimes on the same topic:

The Bush order, issued in December 2005 ... booted the Army secretary
out of the No. 3 slot in the order of succession, in favor of the under
secretary of defense for intelligence... [T]op Rumsfeld aides acknowledged at the time that the decision had dual motivations: It was an official affirmation of their trust in Mr. Cambone’s experience and intellect — and a slap at the Army’s leadership at the time.

So in a plan to protect our nation at its most vulnerable, we were playing politics?! "I am going to stomp my foot and make a change because I can, and Union be damned!" How irresponsible! Can you imagine the hue and cry from the faux Chicken Hawks were the shoe reversed, and President Obama were to try something similar? I bet you can. Unbelievable! We are lucky we got off as lightly as we did with eight years of that mendacious, petty man in charge. Go CDC and President Obama!

6. And on a lighter note, from the Honolulu Advertiser, Manoa Valley has caught its invasive Coqui Tree Frog!

Happy St Patrick's Day, all - Erin Go Bragh!

What it costs to save a buck (Part 2)

2010-03-09T21:26:00.000-08:00

I tried to buy a toilet brush the other day, and I walked out of the store with a bunch of sponges. They had toilet brushes, but they were all made in China and I do not buy things made in China if I can at all help it.

In addition to the environmental reasons, there are the realpolitik reasons. No one else on the international stage is a threat to the U.S. geopolitically except for China, and yet we - you and I, American consumers - keep transferring our national wealth there.

It's different than when we buy gas and transfer wealth to oil producing states in the Middle East, or to Nigeria, or to Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. Each of those is problematic, for different reasons, but each is manageable from a national security standpoint.

The Arab states may be odious and our reliance on their natural resources may be morally troubling - unless you think that women shouldn't drive, have the ability to divorce abusive husbands or own property; or think that Israel should be wiped off the map; or think that private sex acts should land one in prison; or think any one of a number of things anathema to liberal Westerners - but the Arab states and their shadowy extra-governmental players are not a threat to Western Democracy or to the United State's standing in the world. They can harry us, and scare us, and cause our more cowardly leaders like former President Bush to cravenly sacrifice the values of centuries, but can you really imagine a multi-polar world in which Arab states are true rivals? Saudi Arabia as a threat to the United State's position as a global leader? It's implausible.

Nigeria cannot feed and educate its own people, and is a state riven by deep political, religious and ethnic divisions. Just this week there was bloody evidence that it is coming apart at the seams via yet another paroxysm of sectarian violence -it is not a threat to anyone but itself.

Venezuela has been somewhat successful in positioning itself as the head of Latin America's drift to the left, but even a coalition of very strong, united Latin American nations - which could perhaps be a counter balance to the United States - would take years to develop, and would not be led by Venezuela, it would be led by Brazil or Argentina. (And since I began this post the drift to the left seems to be slowing - Chile chose a rightist billionaire to succeed the center-left Ms. Bachelet.)

Despite all the billions and billions in national wealth that we are transferring out of this country for imported oil (and in 2005, we imported nearly 14 billion barrels a day at an average of $50/bbl, which is a metric crap-ton), squandering our national treasure for oil will have significant short- and medium-term implications, and it certainly has implications in terms of the environment and the capacity to fund domestic priorities, but it seems unlikely to have long term real-politik implications for the U.S. on the world stage.

When you think about China, can you imagine a realistic counterweight to the United States' role in the world? Do you see a rival? Is a bipolar world with those aligned with China and those aligned with the U.S. that difficult to conceive?

It's hard to believe how quickly this came about. My Aunt and Uncle visited China on some sort of farm exchange in the early 1980's, before visiting China was really done. They came back with pictures and impressions of poverty and crowds and a nation that was in no way in a position to challenge the U.S. (Everyone in the 80's was talking about Japan - remember? High schools couldn't offer Japanese classes quickly enough, and there was a general fear that a nation of 125 million people and no natural resources was going to buy up the United States.)

The trade deficit is the difference between what we sell and what we buy from another nation. According to the Census Bureau (source for all trade deficit figures), in 1989 our trade deficit with China was $6.234 billion. Sound like a lot? In 1999 it had increased to $68.68 billion. Ten times the amount, in ten years. In 2008, it was $71 billion - for one quarter of the year - for the whole year, it was $268 billion ($69.7 billion dollars in exports, $337 billion in imports).

We run a trade deficit with nearly everyone - by way of comparison, for 2008 we also had a trade deficit with Canada ($78 billion); Mexico ($64 billion); even Papua New Guinea ($35 million). (Nearly, but not everyone - Singapore buys nearly $12 billion more from us in bilateral trade. Makes me like Singapore even more.) One difference here is the size of the deficit in relation to the entire exchange. With Canada, our largest trading partner by far, our trade deficit is only 13% of the whole amount of goods exchanged. We sell them $261 billion worth of stuff, and we buy $340 billion worth of stuff. Our trade deficit is big, and growing bigger, but $80 billion on a total exchange of $600 billion - it's still pretty much a two way street. With China, it's a one way street: the trade deficit represents 60% of the total amount exchanged. For every buck of stuff they buy from us, we buy nearly FIVE bucks worth of stuff from them.

"So what?" you may be asking. "So what's the big deal about running a trade deficit?" With Canada, when it's relatively small (compared to the total of the bilateral trade amounts) - there is no big deal. It's a good deal, many would say - the markets are working, and we are buying stuff from them that they produce more cheaply or better, like cars, car parts, paper goods, electricity, aluminum, maple syrup; they buy from us stuff that we make more cheaply or better like cars (number one on both lists), car parts, plastics, computers. Consumers in both countries come out ahead - we save money, we stimulate each other's economy more or less equally, and no one, really, on either side of the border, is going to worry about the other foisting values that we don't share onto the other, or starting a war, or blowing each other's shit up. Win-win.

With China? Well, a couple of things. First, it's not a fair game. China manipulates their currency. The yuan (a/k/a "renminbi" or "RMB") is not traded on international currency markets the way that the Euro, yen, baht, pound, and other currencies are. This allows the Chinese government to keep it undervalued, meaning:

... China’s currency policy has made the RMB significantly undervalued vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar (with estimates ranging from 15% to 40%) and this makes Chinese exports to the United States cheaper, and U.S. exports to China more expensive, than they would be if exchange rates were determined by market forces.

from: China-U.S. Trade Issues by Wayne M. Morrison; Specialist in Asian Trade and Finance (Congressional Research Service, 23 Jun 2009

The result is that some sectors of the US economy are not competing on a level playing field with Chinese manufacturers - that there is, in effect, a 15% to 40% tariff on our own goods made in the US. Try to buy a sock made in the U.S., for example. No, go ahead... I'll wait. I tried, this week, with no luck. Four stores. I finally bought some made in El Salvador (2008 bilateral trade surplus of $234 million, by the way). Try to buy steel made in this country. Or furniture that's not Amish. Or plastics. Or shoes.

So we've lost whole manufacturing sectors because we didn't want to pay more for goods that have been dumped on our market by Chinese manufacturers getting a 15 to 40% discount because the yuan is artificially low. And drive through a textile town in North Carolina or Tennessee or Pennsylvania, and you can see the results of our decision to save a buck.

We lose manufacturing jobs, we lose towns, we lose families. And China gains jobs, and towns, and a surplus. And what does China - one party ruling, free speech fearing, dissident locking, Tibet cleansing, Taiwan scaring, missile firing, jet downing China - do with its surplus? It buys US debt.

So, we buy socks made in China that, because of currency manipulation, are 15-40% cheaper when they are imported to your local Target store. A sock manufacturer in Schuylkill County, PA, can't sell as many socks because the market is flooded with cheap Chinese goods (and NOT because American worker's wages are too high or because of unions, but because we've allowed a trading partner to have a huge built-in competitive advantage over domestically produced stuff. This isn't the market's fictitious "invisible hand" - this is goods dumping). Factory workers are laid off. The U.S. government needs to pay unemployment insurance to the laid off factory workers. To pay for that in a time of economic contraction, we need to go into deficit spending, selling bonds. China, flush with dollars, buys our bonds. They hold our debt. This isn't some benign Fowler State Bank who has no particular agenda with how you spend your money - this is a foreign power.

Rather than hold dollars (which earn no interest), China has sought to invest its dollars in U.S. assets, primarily U.S. government debt securities... [S]ome policymakers have expressed concern that growing Chinese holdings of U.S. debt may increase its leverage over the United States on a number of economic and non-economic issues, and some contend that China’s currency policy was a contributing factor to the current global economic crisis.

The salient point? "China may increase its leverage over the United States on a number of economic and non-economic issues..."

Our everyday decisions in the marketplace - our economic decisions about what we buy and where it's made - result in lost sovereignty, and what's more, lost sovereignty to the nation that looms as a most likely rival and one that doesn't share our values.

That's a steep price to pay for cheap consumer goods. We can't afford it.

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Hypocrisy, both religious AND political, #3,412...

2010-03-09T10:47:00.000-08:00

No way. Just... no way.

As reported in the LA Times and other outlets, California State Senator Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield), divorced and father of four, is gay.

Care to make a guess about his record on gay issues? It's perfect - anti, every time.
Gay marriage? No (2005)
Designation of May 22 as Harvey Milk Day? No (three times)
Hosted - HOSTED - anti-gay marriage rallies? Yes (2005)
The beat goes on.

How do we know he's gay, and why is he coming out now? Because he got busted for a DUI after leaving a gay bar in Sacramento. On Latin night. With a young Latino man in the passenger seat.

Any guesses on Senator Ashburn's voting record on Latino Issues? Equally neaderthalic. From akawilliam.com (thanks, Landis):

... when he votes against immigrants as often and as viciously as he voted against gay people, when Ashburn votes against brown people, dehumanizes them (us, really) by voting to deny them access to education and voting to keep them from having government-recognized identities and even voting to prevent other Californians from learning about the contributions of immigrants to the state of California, Ashburn moves from a pathetic confusion and into a plantation mentality.

And what does he now ask? For prayers. From a man who is so Christian as to follow in Jesus' example and clothe the naked and comfort the afflicted... oh, wait. He didn't do that, so much. Maybe if the afflicted are white? It seems that if the naked are brown, he particularly doesn't want them clothed.

And, the infantile "god as switchboard operator" school of theology. Dude, seriously. If you believe god exists, and IF you believe that he is omnipotent and overseer of all creation - how small are you making him (or her, clearly, but i'd be willing to bet a kidney that this jackhole prays to a white male god) to worry about your interest in hooking up with another dude? And presumably, like most mos, you didn't wake up one day after a marriage with four kids and think "I wonder what gay sex is like? Think I'll try that..." No, you came this way, out of the womb, like mos do, as the way your creator made you. And due to an effed up theology based on spurious and highly selective extrapolation from a thousands-year-old verbal tradition from a band of nomads who believed in slavery, stoning your children and incest, you made yourself, literally, crazy about liking other guys. And that led you to second guess the creator.

AND that led you to foist your self-loathing and neuroses onto the state of California, and to me.

What the hell do you do with these people?!

The fixation on gays and immigrants as fundraising tools and vote-getters for some on the right in this country is despicable. Behind in an election? Blame the Mexis (Hello, Governor Wilson?). Need to get out the vote? Spread lies about queer folk. Need a grabby headline for a fundraising mailer? Pick one. And then go to a gay bar and try to pick one up.

Disgusting, and beneath contempt.

And you can heed his request to pray all you want to help Senator Ashburn... what, exactly? Not dig brown dudes? Not drive drunk? Not be a complete and utter d-bag? All of the above?

How does one go through life with such self-loathing? Does that increase the frisson of the hook-up, buying in (and reinforcing) the illicitness of the act?

Sen. Ashburn drove drunk in a tax-payer car. Shockingly poor judgment that put the health and lives of himself, his date and others in danger.

But if he weren't termed out, do you think the good voters of his district would be more willing to look past a.) the DUI or b.) the fact that he was driving away from a gay bar with a young Latino male companion?

My money is on a. Disgusting.
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How could you pass up a headline like this?

2010-03-05T23:11:00.000-08:00

As reported in the Guardian (and others, including CNN which gives excerpts from transcripts):

"Vatican hit by gay sex scandal"

I mean... this is just too good not to read.

I'm not proud of my schadenfreude, I'm really not. But when someone in the Church - a married someone - is so highly placed as to be a member of the Pope's personal entourage as a "Gentleman of His Holiness" and "a senior adviser to the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples," and Carbonieri wire taps, which were originally procured for an investigation into corruption and bribery, yield evidence of that supposed corruption, yes, but also of male prostitution on this someone's part - I mean, come ON! There's only so much self-restraint I can be expected to demonstrate.

Evidently, "Gentlemen of His Holiness" have been around since Pope Leo I in 440 CE. How much you wanna wager that since roughly 440 CE there have been "Gentlemen of His Holiness" who have been interested in other "Gentlemen of His Holiness"?

Too bad it's not the Prada-wearing PapaNazi who was himself embroglioed in such a matter, for there's nothing more appreciated here at Bren'sLeftCoast then religious hypocrisy, but this is still pretty amusing.

It's sad, though, too, of course. This poor guy's life is over. The Chorister from the story who has been hooking this well placed Vaticanite up with company has already been fired. I hope the two Cuban lads, the former rugby player and the former male model from Milan who all consorted with the Vaticanite don't have experience any blowback from their association and get to keep their earnings.

I also hope for a time when the Vatican has better things to do - correction, when the Vatican realizes that it has better things to do - than myopically focus on groinal politics.

At some point don't you just throw in the towel and say "Look, some dudes are just gonna dig other dudes. We can't stop it. Let's talk some more about the work with poor people (or sweatshop workers or, or, or) that our people are doing..." ?

Until then, scandals will occur, choristers will catch the eyes of "Gentlemen of His Holiness," bad decisions will get made, and human nature will be denied.

And that stained glass curtain they're hiding behind,
Well, it never lets in the sun...

I'll take "inure" for $200 please (Malaysia edition)

2010-02-26T20:33:00.000-08:00

Malaysia.

What do you think of? Anything? Nice beaches, just south of Thailand and north of Singapore and Indonesia, destination for visa runs for farang in Thailand, briefly home of the world's tallest building, sodomy, moderate majority Muslim nation, one party rule, growing high tech economy, ...

Well, yes, one of those does seem somewhat out of place. But this is just fantastic, and too good not to report on - sodomy seems to be all the rage in Malaysia these days, and everyone is talking about it.

Malaysia is a former British colony that inherited former British laws, meaning sodomy is illegal, even between two consenting adults. Unbelievably intrusive for the state to have this kind of control over people's private lives, but much of the world is like this. It nearly always gives police and the state a powerful means of controlling personal behavior, and a way to shame and manipulate and intimidate anyone they don't like. In Malaysia's case, how often has the law been enforced? As reported in the LA Times,

Legal records suggest that sodomy charges under Section 377 [the anti-sodomy law] have been leveled only seven times in Malaysia in 70 years, according to thenutgraph.com, an independent Malaysian news website, with four of those charges being against Anwar.

Who is Anwar? A particularly randy and exhibitionistic practitioner? A gay rave promoter?

No, and no - he is a 62 year old deputy former deputy prime minister. Married, with six children.

Anwar Ibrahim was at one time considered to be one of those in line for the Prime Minister's post in Malaysia, but in 1997 he went too far in criticizing his own party during the Asian currency crisis, publicly spoke of paralysis, incompetence and nepotism in the ruling party (United Malays National Organization, or UNMO), called for more economic liberalisation, and ran afoul of the ruling party. The sitting prime minister, then as now Mahatir Mohamad, decided he had heard enough - and that the thing to do would be to charge Anwar with the foulest crime he could think of. So, of course, Anwar was charged with sodomy, convicted in 2000, and exonerated in 2004. The plan was to cause abhorrence in the electorate and to end the challenge to the ruling party.

Well, it didn't quite work out that way.

Anwar, who is a slight man (and who has been charged in both cases of sodomizing a much larger "strapping" man), far from becoming less popular, has become a leader of the nascent opposition movement in Malaysia (New Yorker, May 18, 2009, subscription required). And while I disagree with his politics, how can you not like a man who has gone from being, essentially, a party hack to someone who was harangued in public in a show trial in which he was luridly accused (with stained mattresses, et al.) for weeks on end, thrown into solitary confinement, and emerged to be a unifying force for a riven multi-ethnic nation ruled by an increasingly out of touch and ossified one party system. Again from the LA Times:

Although he was banned from running for political office for five years, he helped energize the opposition, which in 2008 won five of Malaysia's 13 states, its best-ever showing, denying the ruling coalition the two-thirds parliamentary majority it had in effect held since 1969.

Since then, the opposition has won seven of nine by-elections, including one that put Anwar back into parliament, challenging the dominance that Malaysia's main ruling party has enjoyed since independence.

So, he's a friend of Paul Wolfowitz. You gotta admire the guy.

He's back in court, again on sodomy charges, again lurid, and again the Malaysian nation is getting treated to a very frank discussion of male-on-male sex. And in the last ten years, the internet has made the details of the trial much more accessible to the average Malaysian.

The effect of all of this? Well, some in Malaysia are concerned that the once-taboo topic has become inescapable (think Monica's blue dress times a factor of 20 - Google "Malaysia Sodomy" and see for yourself!), and that by attempting to "tar" Anwar with the charge of sodomy, when he clearly is innocent, the power of the taboo has been broken.

By bringing false, politically motivated charges against Anwar, Mahatir has made sodomy a proxy for a trumped up charge. Further, by making it a topic of general conversation, nationwide, Mahatir has accomplished what may have taken a generation of gay rights activists to do: make sodomy mundane, and boring. Quotidian. The boogie man under the bed loses his power once you turn on the light.

And if you hear of UNMO losing its post-independence grip on Malaysian politics and power, you can think of the falsified case against Col. Dreyfus which backfired, and lead to the secularization of France; and of the calumny of "religious leaders" in Colorado who lied and lied to get people to vote for the anti-gay Prop 2 which backfired, and ultimately lead to overturning all sodomy laws in the U.S. And you can smile to yourself knowing that, one more time, the powerful liars didn't get it all their way.

Watch this space. Should it come to pass, I'll definitely write about it. And I'll definitely gloat.

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I miss the paper

2010-02-23T20:33:00.001-08:00

I've come to realize that a daily paper is my muse. I read the paper, the things in the paper make me crazy, and then I have lots of things to write about. Unfortunately the San Francisco Chronicle and I can't seem to get on the same page, so to speak, about when I am going to be in town and when I'm not, so that paper has been showing up when I'm gone and not appearing when I'm home. Since my roommates are philistines who don't read the paper and instead stack it neatly in my room in my absence, unread, it's a problem.

The last two days I've been travelling through LAX and have had access to the LA Times, my favorite American newspaper. And I've read yesterdays and todays, cover to cover, with my collective 7 hours of layover time in LAX and Santa Barbara (yes... Santa Barbara) airports. And I've got lots of things I'm fired up about. Here are just a few:

JOBS BILL! As reported in the LA Times, Scott Brown (R-MA), the oft-though-not-always-clothed new Senator in the Lion's Seat, voted along with Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME); Susan Collins (R-ME); Christopher Bond (R-MO); and George Voinovich (R-OH) for President Obama's jobs bill, which passed 62-30 over GOP attempts to muster a filibuster. Really, Republicans? Filibustering a JOBS bill? The Filibuster is meant to be a tool of last resort to protect the Union in cases of grave crisis. In a week that saw the publication of stories about how it may take at least one decade for the jobs lost in the last three years to come back, you are using this tool of last resort to prevent a law that: waives the 6.2% Social Security Tax for the year for new hires, in an attempt to spur, you know, HIRING; reauthorizes the Highway Trust Fund that uses gas taxes to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure; allows businesses to write off equipment as an expense all at once, now, instead of allowing it to depreciate over time; and expands a bonds program that will fund schools and energy projects. So let's review - reduce taxes (which Republicans should be able to get behind) and have giveaways to businesses (which Republicans should be able to get behind) and they threaten to FILIBUSTER! It's simply outrageous. And equally outrageous, and sickening, is that Harry Reid and other Senator Democrats (D-NV) are crowing and "ebullient" (which is a word you don't get to see often in print, and even less when it's connected to Senator Harry Reid). This bill is one TENTH the size of the Jobs Bill that the House passed. This bill creates 350,000 jobs, according to the CBO, but we've lost 8 million jobs! This is a drop in the bucket, and it was this hard to get? Stop rolling over! Change Senate rules to abolish the Filibuster, or make it 55 votes to get cloture, and get something done! But at least we got a jobs bill. And I was in Flint, Michigan last week. I'd say we need it.
Keep the Faith - It might not seem like it, but at least one study is reporting that youth are less religious. An LA Times article reported the results of a recent Pew Charitable Trust study showing that Milennials are by far the least religious of any American generation. Ever. They still believe in some sort of higher power, and they still pray, but they are generally unfreighted with all of the knowledge dulling, democracy eroding, fear enabling attachment to organized religion that previous generations endured. Like so much else in American life, however, there is a polarization, with moderate religious organizations (i.e., ones that don't think every contradictory word in the Bible is to be taken literally) losing ground and Evangelical religious groups gaining ground. Great. Like we didn't have enough polarization (and concomitant ossification) in the Senate, now the kids are going to be moving to the ends on religion, too. But the fewer are religiously affiliated now, the better that augurs for rational public policy in a host of areas moving forward.
What century is it? You might remember reading about a case from Recife, Brazil, last March, in which a nine-year-old girl in Brazil was raped by her stepfather. She got pregnant, with twins. She was nine, remember. Had she carried to term, she would have died, so doctors aborted the twin fetuses to save her life. The local Catholic bishop church excommunicated the doctor, the medical support team, and the girl's mother. The girl was not excommunicated because "The Church is benevolent when it comes to minors," and it need not be said that the rapist step-father was not excommunicated. C'mon, he's a dude, and he only raped his step-daughter, which is less grave than obtaining, performing, or assisting an abortion. Why is this back in the news? Because the chief Vatican bioethicist, Msgr. Renato Fisichella, has been recorded as saying that the doctor and the medical team don't deserve excommunication - they were trying to save the girl's life, after all. And there have been calls for his resignation for such outrageous remarks, which he has so far side-stepped. Story here.
Wait, what? Oh, yeah, I forgot to nap! Researchers have conducted a study that would seem to indicate that not only do we feel better after napping, that our blood pressure drops and our long term risk of heart attack is lowered, but napping can help memory and new learning. As reported in, yup, the LA Times. Story here.

Thanks for bearing with the slower winter months on Bren's Left Coast - more soon!

Sacred Heart, Fowler, Indiana - February, 2010

2010-02-22T22:30:00.001-08:00

Below: Sacred Heart Church from US 52 north of Fowler, Indiana. Windmills in background.

Below: Interior, Sacred Heart Church, Fowler, Indiana.

Below: Front view of Sacred Heart Church, Fowler, Indiana, with steeple.

Below, interior of Sacred Heart Church, Fowler, Indiana, from choir loft.

Below, side view of Sacred Heart Church, Fowler, Indiana.

Below: Front view of Sacred Heart School and Church, looking south down IN-55/ Washington Street, Fowler, Indiana.

Below: Cornerstone, Sacred Heart Church, Fowler, Indiana.

Below: Interior, Sacred Heart School gym, Fowler, Indiana.

Below: Interior of Sacred Heart School gym, Fowler, Indiana, facing the stage.

Fowler, Indiana - February, 2010

2010-02-22T21:45:00.000-08:00

Below: From US 52 looking east towards Sacred Heart Church (steeple), Fowler, Indiana; windmills in background.

Below: Looking south from the Fowler Park (Fowler, Indiana) across the pond; windmills in background.

Below: Looking SSE from the BP station in Fowler, Indiana, down US 52. The "new" grain elevator used to dominate the landscape as the most prominant human-made feature in the county. Then came the new water tower, and now it's the new windmills.

Looking NNE towards Fowler, Indiana, from Sacred Heart Cemetary on Windler Road. From left (west) to right: the old grain elevator, the new grain elevator, the new watertower and the smokestack from the old canning factory.

Below, Looking north across the Fowler Pool, Fowler, Indiana.

What it costs to save a buck, part 1

2010-02-01T23:30:00.000-08:00

Two friends who grew up in Long Beach, California, have asthma. The childhood asthma rate for Long Beach is 22%; the rate for the US as a whole is 14%. What do you think it costs Los Angeles County - in health care, in decreased productivity - to have large communities with asthma rates 50% higher than the national average? Even if all of those families in Long Beach, Wilmington, Lomita, Harbor City, Carson and San Pedro have insurance - and they don't, but let's say they do - their insurance carriers have to charge the entire pool of their policy holders higher rates to cover the costs of carrying health insurance on people who are far more likely to have asthma. Someone's gotta pay, and the premise behind insurance is that you spread that cost around a broad pool of policy holders - that's how it works - so everyone who has health insurance with a company that insures people in the Port of Long Beach and Los Angeles region pays more to cover their asthma related exposure and expenses.

According to the US Census, the poverty rate in Long Beach is over 19%, so we can assume that many of those folks don't have insurance. How do you treat your child's asthma if you don't have insurance? Think about that - if your three old can't breathe, what do you do? You go to the ER. They have to treat you. And someone has to pay for it. What if you have to take a day off work to take your little girl to the ER? You can take a vacation day or a sick day, if you get them, but more than likely you have only time off without pay. So now you're further behind financially.

Why is the asthma rate so high in Long Beach and Lomita and Carson? It's an area of high asthma rates because it has poor air quality. And it has poor air quality because of its largest employer, the Port of Long Beach (Above, from the LA Almanac, here.)

I love the Port. When I lived in Long Beach I used to love to go over and watch the cranes unload the cars from South Korea and Japan, and the forty foot containers of consumer goods from China. It's an amazing sight to see - the human will and ingenuity is on display everywhere; the scale of the ship and the mountains of goods was dwarfing; the wealth and interconnectedness of Pacific nations was just cool to witness first hand. There are good Union jobs at the ports, and that work sustains blue collar families in ways that good Union jobs sustained millions of Americans in previous decades, and allowed their kids to access the middle class.

But the ships that come into it burn bunker fuel,

...so dirty each particle of exhaust legally can be 3,000 times higher in sulfur than the fuel soon to be used by new diesel trucks. Even industry lobbyists have said international ship-fuel standards for sulfur, a primary component of acid rain, are ridiculously high.

And it's not just sulfur, though that's a good place to start:

International shipping accounts for eight percent of global sulphur emissions. This is unsurprising considering that the industry largely uses bunker fuel, which... contains the excess sulphur driven out by the distillation process, upwards of 2000 times that which is found in highway diesel fuel.

Think about how dirty a semi truck is, and now think about the fact that the oil that ships burn, from Hong Kong or Shanghai or Singapore or Yokohama to Long Beach or Los Angeles or Oakland, is one thousand times dirtier.

So when we buy stuff that's imported from China, or Bangladesh, or the Philippines, or the E.U., or from any country outside the NAFTA zone that delivers goods by sea, we are buying stuff that was shipped here in a forty foot container on a container ship. Everything we do to feel like we're making a difference in our daily emissions: all the newer, cleaner, more efficient private cars in the world, and all our work in changing every light bulb in the house to a high energy fluorescent; all the laws more tightly regulating diesel emissions in trucks and trains in the U.S., Canada and Mexico through NAFTA; all the additional taxes on air travel for carbon offsets; all the reduced trips on "Spare the Air Days" and all of the awareness of our carbon footprint - all of it doesn't matter if we still chase the "cheapest" consumer goods.

If we - the American consumer, you and I - insist on saving a dollar on a t-shirt that was made in China and shipped here in a forty foot container, then we are heavy, heavy polluters. No one thing would reduce our environmental impact - emissions, fuel consumption, carbon footprint - as much as not buying things shipped to us in bunker-fuel driven 40-foot container cargo vessels.

Do you feel good about recycling that cardboard box when you get home from the store? Good for you. But if it was packaged in China and shipped here in a 40-foot container, you are still deeply, deeply in the red, environmentally speaking.

When we save a buck on that t-shirt, we reward bad behavior, we shift costs to the public sphere (our taxes pay for harbor infrastructure and rail and highway distribution networks, and for higher public assistance costs related to health care and decreased productivity) and give profits to the private sphere (factory owners, ship owners, retail outlet owners). Do we really want to do that?

So look at the label when you go shopping, and stop saving thirty cents or a buck or three bucks on stuff that was made overseas.

When we "save" on cheap, sea-shipped imported goods, we are buying asthma for our neighbors and thus additional health care costs for ourselves, we are buying sulfur and heavy particulate pollution for our ecosystems, and we are overwhelming any good work that we do in other areas of our lives in terms of recycling or reducing our fuel consumption.

Doesn't seem like such a good deal, does it?

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"The milk wars..."

2010-01-31T23:44:00.000-08:00

Materially, I had it easier than my older siblings, I know this. By the time I got to be in high school there were simply fewer mouths to feed and more income coming in - of course things were going to be easier. Some of my older siblings who still lived at home helped contribute to household expenses - the phone bill stopped being something that was fought about every single month, for one thing, but the most transformative for my life was when we went off powdered milk.

Store bought milk was too expensive for us growing up; powdered milk was much cheaper and with ten kids in the house that's what we could afford. It was someone's job to "make the milk" - you always used the same dented two gallon aluminum sauce pan, and got water out of the tap as cold as you could, and mixed in the powder. I remember so clearly the clanking and scraping sounds the metal spoon made on the side of that sauce pan, and how you had to mix real well so there weren't clumps of powder on the bottom. Not that the taste really improved but it was better to at least drink it in a liquid and not a choke down a solid. There were some discussions about whether putting the powder or the water in first was the way to go, or that it tasted better one way or the other. It didn't. It was always, consistently awful. It was chalk water, with an aftertaste that would linger no matter what you did. Ice cubes, or (on the sly) sugar, nothing made any difference - that aftertaste stayed on your tongue. Think: a gallon pitcher of powdered coffee creamer and water. That's basically what it was.

We had to have one glass of milk at every meal, so one approach was to slam it down, as quickly as you could, right at the start of the meal, and then pace yourself through high moisture content foods the rest of the way so you didn't get thirsty and need another glass. If you waited until the milk had warmed up, even just a little, you were a goner. It got almost chewy, or more dense, or something. It could be that there was little real difference, but since we'd talked ad nauseum about strategies to make it "better", and the one consensus seemed to be around "drink it cold", that I just felt it got worse the longer it sat there. Or it could have been the building fear.

On your cereal powdered milk was okay - you only put enough on to wet the flakes and then you were good. Drinking the milk out of the bottom of the bowl was not done; you were to make an honest attempt at getting it all with your spoon, without too much clattering, but a little layer of milk at the bottom of your bowl was acceptable. But that glass of milk, looming at about 2 o'clock above your dinner plate, a little above your knife and spoon was just... well, daunting, really.

You had to strategize. Was this a night when you were going to resist, or was this a night for drinking the whole glass right off the bat and getting it over with? What was the meal - were there lettuce or carrots or bell peppers? How much bread was there? If there was stew - and my ma made awesome stew - then you were saved and the chug first strategy would work. If it were during Lent and there were only tuna briquettes, well, you were screwed. They were so dry you had to have liquid, and they didn't taste that good to start with. (Sorry, but they didn't - like bloated Toblerone in shape, tuna briquettes were basically little mini meatloaves except they were triangular, and tuna, and covered in crumbled generic saltines, and fried in Crisco. And often one side was pretty well done. The woman was busy with 112 things while she was trying to get dinner on, so sometimes things burned.) What to do? Lent was a season of sacrifice and preparation, and we took that literally in our house growing up. That Lenten meal might be a night for resistance.

This implies forethought but I don't think there was much. There were just times when I couldn't or wouldn't choke down a full glass of powdered milk, and I had to sit at the table, stubbornly, fuming, while everyone else cleaned up and went in the living room and got to watch Hee Haw. (Yes, when I was a kid watching Hee Haw was an incentive to good behavior. I remember mentioning that in a conversation my first year at Marquette, and a floormate from California looking at me, agape, like he'd never really seen me before.)

My parents were tough when I was a little kid, and that changed over time, too - they mellowed by the time I was in high school. Some of this was because I had learned things over the years from my ring side seat, watching my older brothers go rounds with dad and mom. Most fights could be avoided if I returned their car with even a little gas; if I called in advance if I was going to miss supper; if I let them know where I was periodically. But I realize with an adult's perspective that of course they mellowed - their stress level must have dropped significantly by the time I got to be in 7th grade, when they had only (!) three or four kids at home to feed on a daily basis, or in high school when sometimes it was just me, and things weren't so tight financially. I have first hand experience with periods of paucity, and not knowing how I was going to make a rent payment; times when I'd walk home from work because I was out of CTA tokens and couldn't afford the fare, or when I'd get $5 from an ATM because I didn't have $10 to my name. I remember the stress that caused me, and that was just me. No one was counting on me, I didn't have to support anyone, and I came home to an empty, quiet apartment where I'd do the crossword or go for a bike ride. But I was stressed about money, and that stress was always with me - every meal time, every commute, every trip past my mailbox, unopened for fear of what overdraft notices might be in it - coiling around in my head, over and over. And that was just me.

How much financial stress must my parents have been under? How were they going to get heating oil for the furnace for the winter, or the glasses that were needed, or school supplies, or groceries for the week? They didn't talk about it, not to us, but it suffused everything. So if my dad went a little over the top about me not drinking my milk, well, I get it. A lot of dads in that situation would have beat the crap out of me for my lack of respect and my disobedience. I never got the: "I work my tail off to provide and what I provide isn't good enough? What kind of over-coddled insolent little guy are you?" speech. On some level I suspect my dad was frustrated in not being able to give us all what we wanted. They almost never hit me, and they definitely never hit me over milk. Even when I would sit at the table for hours, alone, in front of my orange metal glass of room temperature powdered milk, not drinking it. I'd sit there, in the dark kitchen, with Hee Haw audible from the next room. I was stubborn, and would dig in my heels. No one else defied our parents, not in so obvious and brazen a manner, as I did. It was my line in the sand. "It wasn't fair," I thought - though the specifics on why it wasn't fair, exactly, haven't survived - and even then my world view was fairness-centered. "Why should I have to?" And the standard response of "Because I said so" wasn't good enough for me, not on this score.

In most ways I was a good kid - not overly hard working, perhaps, but deferential, sensitive and obedient. Except on this point. I hated that powdered milk, and I deeply resented that one glass requirement. So there I'd sit, some nights until way past my bedtime, sometimes falling asleep in a kitchen chair. I'd get carried up the stairs, angry and defiant and tearful, and put into bed. And at breakfast, sitting at two o'clock above my cereal bowl, just above my spoon, was the metal orange glass of powdered milk that had been put in the fridge overnight. And I wasn't allowed to use that milk for my cereal - I had to drink it. And it would start again.

My oldest sister loves to tell of how I mailed her a letter, while she was living in Texas, that in its entirety read: "Dear ___, The milk wars are on again. Love, Steve."

When some of my older siblings got jobs, they started buying "store bought milk". I don't know if they told mom and dad ahead of time, or if they did it because they were tired of the spectacle that I provided. It didn't matter. I didn't know the words at the time, but it was clearly profligate, and decadent. And I was instantly completely hooked. Oh my god, it tasted so good! And the first glass and the last glass tasted the same! And within reason, it was still palatable when it warmed up a little - at the end of the meal, if there was a gulp or two at the bottom of your glass, you could still drink it and not gag! We never went back.

Shortly thereafter, my parents' buying patterns changed and they started buying some name brand stuff, and for some things there is definitely a difference. Generic catsup isn't all that great, for example; the ice milk suddenly and without comment was replaced with ice cream, which was simply not comparable. We went from generic powdered drinks or Wyler's brand to Kool-Aid; a noticeable improvement. And my parents stopped buying potato chips in the huge box - it was at least two foot square - that we'd get at the start of every summer. We were expected to eat the ones in the bottom just like we ate the ones when the box was fresh, two months before. Potato chips that have been through a humid Indiana summer in a box that was kept in the laundry room were simply not very tasty. Or crunchy. They were soggy and stale, and they were put on our plates, and we ate them, maybe even after a big gulp of powdered milk if there was three bean salad on offer as well.

And of course with no powdered milk in the cupboard, or in the metal aluminum pan, or in the blue porcelain pitcher with the small chip on the lip, we stopped fighting about me drinking a glass of milk with every meal. Like many wars, I don't know that there was a lot gained by either side. I think I got a reputation among some siblings for being spoiled and impudent, and for having a "smart mouth"; my parents never mentioned these things. I remember thinking that I wished I could be like the others and just suck it up, literally, but I couldn't - or wouldn't, or didn't. Maybe both sides were a bit wounded from the encounter, and equally baffled by it.

One thing I know: everyone was glad when it was over.

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A life well lived

2010-01-09T00:36:00.000-08:00

When my mother was my age I was five. Can you imagine me with a five year old? She worked the 7-to-3 shift at the Green Hill Manor, Fowler's nursing home, and then she'd come home to a five year old. And a 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20 and 21 year old. At my age, she had a full time job out of the house and a full time job in it. She must have been exhausted all the time, but I don't remember ma ever once saying that she was tired. There's no way I can imagine doing what she did - in one generation it went from normal (or at least doable) to unthinkable. I have no contemporaries who have the same life that she had; it's just not one that you can picture in 2010 the way maybe you could in 1973.

How did she do it? How did she cook our meals and clean our clothes and make sure we all knew how to behave in public? How did she have the energy to care for the families in the Migrant Camp? How did she have time to be involved at church, or to go to Parish Council meetings? No wonder she was sharp with us at times. No wonder she was hospitalized for a heart attack at 45, though it was a misdiagnosis and it turned out to be an allergic reaction. I wouldn't have been able to get out of bed every day and face us, get our breakfasts, get us out the door, go to work for eight hours at a small town nursing home, come home, get dinner, pray the rosary, make sure homework was done, get us into bed and get up and do it all over again. And on Wednesday nights get everyone who needed it to CCD, and on Sundays get us all to church. It's exhausting to think about. She must have been on her feet for over twelve hours a day, every day.

And for what? Because it was what was done? Because it was her duty? Because it didn't occur to her to ask about her lot in life, or enquire about other options? I never asked her what she thought about her life. It didn't occur to me as a kid, and at the time of her diagnosis and death I was in my last semester of college and barely aware of my own consciousness, and not thinking about such things.

There were some times when I was a kid when mom wasn't working outside the home, but not many of them. When we moved into Lafayette she got a job right away at the Comfort Nursing Home, across the street from St. Boniface where I went to junior high. She worked the 3 - 11 shift, which was all she could get at first, so I'd troop over to see her after school to say hi. At every nursing home where she worked she'd introduce me to some of the residents, and I'd visit with them, every day I went. There was nothing ever said about how my grandma was in a nursing home a state away and we couldn't see her all the time, so maybe if I was visiting with a lonely elderly woman here then some kid in Springfield, Illinois, was visiting my grandma - no talk of "karma" or of "what comes around goes around," like somehow the universe was keeping score. It was done because it was clearly the right, decent, humane thing to do. And no fuss was made of it, it was simply done, like so much in my mom's life.

She was inherently decent, and I don't know from what wellspring she found the surplus time and energy, but she took in stray people who needed help. All the time. In Fowler there were the Mexican migrant workers, and after we moved into town there was Lena, an old German woman who had no living family here and who Mom often had over to dinner, and to whose house we'd often traipse to clean and cook, and tend her yard. All for free, of course. I don't know how mom first met her - at church, maybe? - but I can picture her clearly, sitting at our table in her housecoat, thick accent and even thicker glasses, telling stories about her time right after she "moofed to dis country." Dad wasn't a fan. We were always polite because she was company, and I actually liked Lena - she was foreign and therefore exotic, and she had a cache of great stories with which to entertain me when she found out how much I loved history. The woman lived under the Kaiser, and while her stories didn't deal much with the realpolitik of the interwar period just that knowledge kept me rapt as she'd talk about her life as a little girl, and their farm, and the cadence of her life.

Then there was Patty, another woman who I have no idea how Mom met. Patty moved in with us, along with her two huge malamutes, for a year. They were beautiful dogs, and the white one had one blue eye and one grey eye. They tore the hell out of our yard, though, and Patty had a pronounced limp and an irascible temperament, and spent a lot of time in her room. Mom was helping her get some physical therapy, or something, though I also remember trips to Springfield with her to see my Aunt the Dominican nun, so possibly she was thinking about a vocation in the convent. Even as a 14 year old kid I could tell that Patty was someone to whom life hadn't been kind, far beyond her physical challenges. Dad wasn't a fan.

Another summer we had a woman staying with us from Peoria, Illinois, for some reason. I want to say it was health related, but I could be wrong - I don't remember any particular physical presentations of a health issue. There was Andrew, a Nigerian seminary student who was with us one year for Christmas, who was unfailingly polite and unfailingly skilled at chess. There was always someone extra for dinner, or for a holiday, who had nowhere to be. There was always some task with which I was charged to help someone out - to rake someone's leaves or to ride my bike over to Mrs. S's and ask her if she needed anything or to volunteer to serve at 7:00 a.m. mass when no one else did, even though that meant that she'd have to get up and drive me. My mom baked cookies and fruitcakes for everyone at Christmas - most of the people on our paper route, the priests and nuns, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and when we moved to town, the neighbors, my teachers at school, my piano teacher, the mail carrier and the garbage men. She didn't see class, she didn't see race, her community was basically everyone she met, and she felt a responsibility to help those in her community who needed it.

There are no bridges or buildings with her name on them, or endowed chairs, or financial legacy for her kids to live on. There isn't even a nursing home wing or hospital floor named after her. Her health was never reliable (which makes her energy even more remarkable), and her allergies got worse and worse as she crossed fifty. When she was 58 she was diagnosed with cancer; when she was 59, she died from it. I was 22.

I have been thinking about what makes our lives meaningful lately, thinking about Stevie, who died at 39 (and requested that donations be made to the humane society), and my friend Gerald White, a fellow English major at Marquette who died at 35 (and after whom a Memorial Fund was named at the University of North Texas, in honor of his research on visual representations of gay minority men), and other people I've known. Does only 35 years mean that a life isn't well lived? Hardly. But what does a "well lived life" mean, after all, and to what ought I aspire?

I got to visit my mom the weekend before she died - I was going to wait a week but on an impulse I rented a car with an overdrawn credit card and drove down from Milwaukee to see her. She was in a lot of pain, and on a lot of drugs. When I got to her room she was asleep, so I hung around, waiting for her to wake up, talking with my dad and my other siblings who were in and out. At one point late at night she stirred, looked at me through barely opened eyes and asked me, "Stephen? When'd you get here? Where'd you come from?"

Knowing she was possibly on morphine and probably incoherent, I answered, "Milwaukee, ma. I rented a car and drove down tonight."

"Who came with you?"

"Just me, ma."

"That's too bad." I had no idea what she meant by this, so I paused, wondering, and then she finished her thought: "With the bags under your eyes you could have packed for a family of four!"

"Hey, you're not looking too good yourself, there!" I told her, and she smiled. She kept herself awake for another hour or so and we had a great talk, and we got to say our goodbyes.

She had lived a good life, and she knew it; and what's more she was still being generous and looking out for those who needed looking out for - at that moment in that hospital room, me.

I think of all the people who were less lonely because of my mom, or less hungry, or less dirty, or less healthy, or less ignorant; of all the people who had a little more dignity in their lives and who were comforted materially and emotionally by her countless acts of kindness and generosity. It's profoundly humbling.

My mom lived a remarkable life of toil and dignity and charity and grace in relative anonymity. No question, her life was a life well lived.
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Happy Solstice!

2009-12-18T00:25:00.000-08:00

I watch Seamus, the shamrock plant that I bought on St Patrick's Day, 2006, follow the sun across my living room here in San Jose. Right now, at midnight, he's folded up his leaves. He's heliotropic, so when it's sunny he opens them and they tilt toward the natural light. If I turn the pot 180' so that the leaves aren't stretching toward the sunlight, within an hour they will be again. It's remarkable and beautiful to watch my houseplant, a fairly basic organism, react to environmental stimulus.

I've named him and I talk about his actions, but the plant is neither conscious or desirous, of course; it is only following a biological imperative. And I don't say "simply" following for it's a complex process, it seems to me. I don't understand what's all involved to make this happen - for a plant in a still room to move from one side of its pot to another to "reach" to sunlight - but I don't think it's simple. (Below is what Seamus looks like when the sun is up. And yeah, he looks a lot healthier in this pic from last year than he does now. He needs sunlight to thrive, in part; and I don't think he's fully recovered from the drive up here, or the cold that we have. Like other organisms in my apartment, the adjustments involved in moving 5 degrees North in latitude have taken their toll and continue to require adjustment.)

And if Seamus "knows" when it's sunny and responds to it on a biological level, why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't the shortening days and lengthening nights have some effect on us as well?

Nearly every culture of which we're aware thought that it did, and had some celebration around this time of year. Ancient cultures, particularly those in high latitudes, noticed when they studied the heavens that after the harvest, year after year, the days would get shorter, and shorter, and shorter, until they didn't anymore - and then slowly, the days would get longer again, and light, if not warmth right away, would return. This was taken to be a sign that spring would eventually return as well, and the cycle of the universe had not been interrupted.

And most cultures had festivals of this time, and most of the festivals had lights - that's what we humans were celebrating, after all, the growing light bringing us growing hope of warmer weather, of future harvests, of the year being over and the new one starting.

The solstice (from Latin, of course, sol stitium, or standing still of the sun) was originally on December 24 in the Julian calendar (the Solstice got moved to the 21/22 of December when things got moved around with the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar), and for many Northern European Bronze Age to Modern cultures the Solstice marked midwinter, not the first day of winter as it's known now. December 24, December 24... remind you of anything?

The odds of Jesus being born on one of the most significant of the Pagan holidays is, well, 1/365; many accounts put his birth sometime in the spring. The earliest record of Jesus' birthday being 25-December comes in 171 CE, which seems odd - why wait for 171 years after the fact to record the date of birth when so much else was recorded about the guy?

Doesn't matter... the solstice is a beautiful holiday and if some johnny-come-lately cults and religions want to horn in on the action, well, why not? The more the merrier. (Even if some of those newcomers insist on trying to crowd out everyone else with the inaccurate statement that "Jesus is the reason for the season." No, he's not. He was a good guy who most certainly did live, and therefore most certainly was born, but he almost assuredly wasn't born on 25-December. "Season" as a chronological term would mean that the Solstice is the reason for the season. I suspect many Christians think about it as the "Let's celebrate the life of the guy who lived a few thousand years ago and said some nice things about trying to be a little more decent to each other" time. Okay, great - but then don't pretend you're the only ones who can celebrate this time of year, or that you invented it, or that this time of year is really when dude was born. You're not, you didn't, and it wasn't.)

Humans, like many other organisms, notice the path the sun seems to carve through our sky, and how many hours and minutes it appears to be out from where we sit as our tiny blue orb wobbles closer and farther through the vacuum of space. So why shouldn't we rejoice when the nights stop getting longer, when the days stop getting shorter, when we have empirical evidence to support the hope that, no matter how crappy everything else might be going, some sense and rhythm has been maintained in the natural order?

Don't you feel better in the sun? Doesn't sunlight cheer you, give you more energy, make things seem a little less grim? Don't you, like Seamus, respond to it on some level?

So, fellow bipeds, chins up! Build a fire, light the candles, turn on the lights on the tree and around the windows - we know that days are getting longer very soon, and light will return, and with it, eventually, warmth.

And just because we know why this happens doesn't mean that it's any less remarkable, or that the season can't have wonder and mystery and renewal and peace. It can, and does.

And so may the growing light bring us growing hope for brighter days, in all senses of the word. And may we all find reason to celebrate this Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, Yule, Kwanzaa, and New Year - and light and warmth and new growth, for Seamus and for us all!

Happy Holidays, everyone!

We who laugh last...

2009-12-15T10:32:00.000-08:00

Case 1: During the Dreyfus Affair, which ripped France apart in late 1800's, the institutional Catholic Church was at its odious worst, using its mouthpieces in the press to slander, calumnify and lie against Col. Dreyfus, his supporters, and "the Jews." At the time, the church's position in Republican France was near-unassailable - the institution had recovered from the secularism of the Revolution era and through the Bourbon restoration had regained much of its wealth, authority, and centrality in public life and civil society. By lying - and let's be clear, some members of the Church hierarchy lied and lied and lied through the Dreyfus Affair, accusing defenders of the wrongfully accused Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew, of being members of a Jewish conspiracy with the Freemasons (oh, yeah, cuz the Freemasons were so down with the Jews?) - and leading hysterical denunciations of Dreyfus in the press, the Catholic right helped to preserve the French Republic. The Dreyfus case roused the French left, invigorated those who believed in the rule of law, including Emile Zola, and lead to a broad coalition of Republicans, secularists, intellectuals, and Jewish leaders, to invigorate the French Republic and to once and for all pass a law for the Separation of Church and State that is still on the books and enforced.

Had rightist members of the Catholic Church hierarchy not waded in so deeply to the Dreyfus Affair, might the institution not have been so tainted and been able to preserve its privileged position in French government and society? Who knows? It does seem at least likely, however, that the zealotry and ignorance - in every sense of the word - of the anti-Dreyfusards made making the case against them even easier, made de-establishing the Catholic Church easier, and made the final legal step of the secularization of French society, begun in 1789, finally complete. Last laugh? Not the liars, calumnifiers, bigots and churchmen.

Case 2: In 1992, when I lived in Colorado, the voters there approved a statewide amendment - Amendment 2 - banning any local gay rights laws. At the time, there were a total of two, in Denver and Boulder, and Vail was thinking about one. This wasn't to outlaw gay marriage - that couldn't have even been considered at the time - this was an initiative lead by Christian fundamentalists in Colorado Springs to nullify the efforts of OTHER municipalities to extend the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to all of their citizens, i.e., to make it illegal to fire someone because they were gay, to deny housing to someone because they were gay, etc. (Yes, in Colorado in 1992, outside of Boulder and Denver, I could be fired for being gay. And the good Christians in Colorado Springs wanted to keep it that way. Because you know, if not, I might go recruiting. Who knows what they are thinking? They think that dinosaurs and humans are co-contemporary, so really...)

Amendment 2 passed. For the first time in my life, I woke up with fewer civil liberties than I had when I went to bed. This wasn't theoretical, this was real - I lived in Denver, and a majority of my fellow Coloradans thought that I should be able to have fewer protections under the law than they had.(*1) The Mayor of Denver, Wellington Webb (an African American who had been courageous in opposing Amendment 2) and the Governor of Colorado, Roy Romer, attended an anti-Amendment 2 Rally on the steps of the State Capitol the next weekend, and there was a huge throng of people out to protest its passage.

There were lawsuits brought, and they went to the Supreme Court in a case called Romer v. Evans (they named Romer as defendant since he was Governor, despite his strong opposition). On May 20, 1996, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Colorado's Amendment 2 was unconstitutional (duh) - saying:

Its sheer breadth is so discontinuous with the reasons offered for it that the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.

[Amendment 2] is at once too narrow and too broad. It identifies persons by a single trait and then denies them protection across the board. The resulting disqualification of a class of persons from the right to seek specific protection from the law is unprecedented in our jurisprudence.

The religious leaders of Colorado Springs, by attempting to deny gay folk in two municipalities in Colorado equal protection under the law, initiated a case that lead to the Supreme Court de facto declaring that equal rights are equal rights, instantly making null the legal basis of Bowers v. Hardwick (1986 - the infamous Supreme Court decision upholding the state's interest to make sodomy illegal) and giving a very strong basis on which to challenge it. Lawrence v. Texas (2003) did just that; all sodomy laws in the country were overturned in a single stroke. Further, there is now an extant Supreme Court decision recognizing that animus toward gay folk isn't enough reason on which to base a law, that gay folk are a protected class due to such animus, and that while not cited as such, created tremendous momentum for the gay marriage movement.

And in May, 2007, Colorado Governor Bill Ritter signed into law a non-discrimination ordinance protecting all Coloradans from discrimination in public accommodation, housing and employment regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression. State wide.

Last laugh? Not the liars, calumnifiers, bigots and churchmen or -women.

I thought of all of this with the news out of Houston and New York and Uganda this week. It's heartbreaking, what religious folks do in the name of Christ to deny equal rights to gay folk, through lies and laws, with fear and murder, around the world. But this is what religion does - it otherizes, it twists, it corroborates or instills fear, it placates inquiry, it satiates base tribal needs - as it always has, from Dreyfus, from the Middle Ages and the Jew-baiting for the plague (never mind that Jewish neighbors were dying in the same numbers). But it doesn't win. Clemenceau, a rabid and raging atheist, became French Prime Minister and the Civil Law of 1905 got passed. Coloradans did the right thing and got a state wide non-discrimination law. Houstonians ignored the calumny of religious leaders about a lesbian candidate for mayor and elected her. New Hampshire gets gay marriage - the full thing - on January 1st. New York doesn't, yet, but will - can we really doubt that?

So when we get despondent about all of the news from the struggles on gay marriage in this country, just think - in 1992 in Colorado some bigots thought they'd tell the Cities of Denver and Boulder that they had to discriminate against their gay neighbors, and now there is a state-wide law protecting gay folk; beginning in a few weeks there's one more state, New Hampshire, in which I'll be able to get married.(*2) No gay kid growing up in Houston thinks he or she is the only one in the world, or that his or her life choices need to be circumscribed by who he or she is.

And in Uganda? Well, that road is longer, and darker, no question. But think of Colonel Dreyfus in prison, and think of who might be Emile Zola or Wellington Webb or Annise Parker.

And maybe some gay kid in Uganda will, like many before her or him, have the last laugh.

__________________
(*1) And this is not theoretical. While living in Long Beach in 1999, Arnold and I decided to move in together. When I told my landlord that my boyfriend was moving in with me, he told me that I'd have to move. Nevermind that my neighbors were an unmarried (straight) couple; or that every other unit in his 4-unit walk up had two or people living in it, none of whom were married - we couldn't live there. Well, in fact, thanks to California law (and the fact that Arnold used to work for fair housing Long Beach), we could. These things happen, all the time, everywhere - it's not theoretical. In which one of the Beatitudes does Christ say to disposses the housed, again?

(*2) No, not that anyone at Bren's Left Coast is asking or being asked - just sayin'

Stories from the week -

2009-12-11T22:52:00.000-08:00

Here are some things I noticed in the news this week -

Yay, Team! Once again, human discipline, effort and commitment has led to a scientific breakthrough with the potential to ease human suffering and prevent death. Which disease? Sickle Cell Anemia. As reported in a story in the LA Times:
"Researchers have for the first time performed a successful bone marrow transplant to cure sickle cell disease in adults, a feat that could expand the procedure to more of the 70,000 Americans with the disease -- and possibly some other diseases as well."
How great is that? Go scientists!

So let's see - Vietnam (per capita income: US$1024) has made a commitment to build high speed rail, and California (per capita income US$38,900) can't? As reported in the Japan Times, Vietnam has decided to go with Japanese technology in building their high speed rail system, beating out the German/French consortium. Political will is easier to muster in a one party state, no question, but the lack of will to seize the future here in California is troubling. The wealth of California has been built on innovation - the world's best university system from the 1960's to the 1990's, the University of California holds 11,000 patents and has acted as an incubator for scientific, pharmaceutical, and of course information technological advancements (together, fine, with Stanford, CalTech, and the Cal State system). We used to do things big here in Cali, and we are slowly killing the goose that laid the golden eggs of our culture, society and economy by strangling the funding for the higher education system here. It's a shame - we've we've lost our commitment to educational excellence and access for all Californians, and we've lost our will to seize the future. We've lost our nerve. And Vietnam, and other countries and cultures around the world, are not going to wait for us to get it back.

Ah, religion (take 1). As reported in the SF Chronicle, it seems that the huge influx of cash coming into Somalia is throwing the economy out of whack, and many of the poor, young, male pirates who are now awash in cash and buying trucks and sex and drugs are no longer living a virtuous lifestyle. The thoughts of one religious leader?
"That is what is worrying us, a lot more than the risk they pose to the foreign ships and crew." Nice. Nevermind that people are getting threatened and that kidnappers are using the threat of murder, or actual murder; according to one mosque leader, the real problem is the dissolute lifestyle that the newly wealthy are living. What is it with religious leaders worried about sex and dissolution more than human life? Seriously? Read the story here.

Ah, religion (take 2). So in Uganda, homosexuality is illegal now. And if you know someone who is gay and you don't report them as gay so they can be put in jail, well, then you can go to jail too. You don't have to have sex to be labelled homosexual and put in jail, you just have to BE homosexual. So that's nice. And guess who is helping get this initiative passed? Religious leaders, of course, lying about gay people and our lives to spread hatred and misinformation. None other than Pastor Rick, whom Obama invited to preside over the inauguration, had ties to Ugandan Christian clergy pushing the bill. As reported in The Week and elsewhere, Warren and other American religious leaders, including Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, who wrote "The Pink Swastika" which argues that homosexuality led to Nazi atrocities. They all had or currently have ties with Ugandan clergy who were pushing the bill (because whenever people spouting superstition, hatred and fear need ideological cover, to whom do they turn? Religious leaders. Inevitably.) Check this out:
"Homosexuality is infectious," says Ugandan Anglican Bishop Joseph Abura in Spero News. "But gays and their sympathizers want to export it here, to spread their satanic 'gay agenda.' Uganda must pass the anti-gay law to stop them, and others who 'want to uproot or bend our cherished traditions and values. For some Anglicans, vices are now virtues.'
Sing it with me: "And we'll know they are Christians by their lies, and their fear / Yes we'll know they are Christians by their hate." In final passage, the Ugandan law was diluted - it's no longer a capital offense to be gay, just an imprisonable offense. You no longer will get executed for being gay, just thrown in jail. Jesus must be so proud.

Ah, religion (Take 3) - it's really like fish in a barrel this week. Mayor Russell Wiseman of Arlington, Tennessee (population 4000, up from just 1500 in 1990 according to the US Census), a fast growing ex-urban community 30 miles outside of Memphis, is mad at our President. It seems that he sat his family down to watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special and Mr. Obama was giving a speech at West Point about escalating the war, which preempted it. Naturally, Mr. Wiseman called Mr. Obama a Muslim, said it was all by design, and called it "total crap." The Facebook posting, sic's and all, is here:
"Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it....w...hen the answer should simply be 'yes'...."

Mr. Wiseman (and does anyone else wonder if maybe he has some ancestors who members of the Tribe, hmmm?) went on to say some more great stuff, here quoting further from the Memphis Commercial Appeal story on it:
In Wiseman's extensive thread that attacked the president, his supporters and Muslims, he stated "...you obama people need to move to a muslim country...oh wait, that's America....pitiful."
At another point he said, "you know, our forefathers had it written in the original Constitution that ONLY property owners could vote, if that has stayed in there, things would be different........"

Setting aside the abuse of periods of ellipses and the grammar confusion, where does one start? I'm sure the church he goes to every weekend nurtures his good Christian belief that Obama is a Muslim and only property holders should be able to vote. Let's not ask him about whether all the queers should be rounded up and put in jail, shall we?

And because Bren'sLeftCoast likes to end on a positive note, and because it was a tough week, news-wise, let's just end with a picture of the beautiful Southern California mountains with more snow than I've ever seen on them, from Tuesday. (Photo taken by Genaro Molina /Los Angeles Times)

And here's to a better week ahead.