Author's posts
Jul 22 2010
The character of your accusers will not matter.
Shirly Sherrod was railroaded.
It is the matter of every day for GLB people in the military. And there is no such thing as a context defense.
They will not ask you or change their minds because your homosexuality was taken out of context.
The character of your accusers will not be taken into account.
The anger at the unfairness of your discharge after years of faithful service will NOT be there. Instead, you will be told to get a life. You will be told you want a pony.
You are a political football. It is for you to hide in silence. It is for you to serve in silence. It is for you to be told the value of honor and truthfulness, and yet also for honor to be considered keeping your big mo mouth shut about your mo-ness.
And it won’t matter if you tell. The character of your accusers will not be considered.
It could be a friend who felt she was slighted by you last Christmas. It could be someone who wanted sex favors from you and didn’t get them. It could be your MOTHER who is your accuser. It could be a police officer who saw a same sex civil marriage contract on your kitchen table, through your kitchen window, investigating a routine complaint, who felt it was his “obligation” to inform the military of your tawdriness. It could be someone who thinks that homosexuality is an abomination, while they play slap and tickle with the female members of their regiment.
It could be a thief. But their character will not matter. At that time, at the time your service is spit upon, you will be told to get a life. You will be told to get a job, that your service means nothing, and that you are whining.
And Keith Olbermann will most likely not get on national TV and berate President Obama on your behalf. You see, you are a number. You are one of the hundreds or thousands of people discharged after a career of honorable service in the military every year.
Oh, he has before, but you are fucking number. Get in line. And the anger, oh, the anger will not be there, because President Obama has more important things to do than to worry about you. He cannot help you, even though he can. DADT is going away, even though it isn’t.
Your words, any defense you may have, will not be taken into context. If you are a woman and like women romantically, you are guilty. If you are a guy and you like the shape of a pair of well turned glutes or six pack abs, you are GUILTY.
And, as you look for a job in this economy in which there is 25% unemployment, this selective anger may irritate you. It may in fact enrage you. It may strike you as odd, that while hundreds and thousands of irreplacable military personnel are told to go hunt for food in trash cans or find a job flipping burgers is all your sacrifice was worth, a huge blow up occurred over ONE WOMAN who was, yes, mistreated, as you were, for a lifetime of faithful service.
While those who are outraged at Shirley Sherrod turn right around and tell you Obama could not protect you, even though he’s the Commander in Chief.
He has to observe the rule of law, you know. Prosecuting whistleblowers, declining to defend marijuana cases (as you know, he has to defend DADT and DOMA, marijuana being somehow different), continuing to have torture bases, and suspending habeus corpus, not being considered within the purview of the Rule of Law.
Welcome to America 2.0. Where Keith Olbermann talks about the fomenting of “hate for Americans, by Americans” but millions of Obama supporters will tell you that you want a pony and that giving you justice in your life is the matter of wanting a pony, and that good soldiers wait, perhaps justice cannot be found for you as it is for others, as if you are a six year old girl.
Because that’s what you are. Not someone who fought and risked your life for your country. To the Democrats, you are a six year old girl.
Keith Olbermann is not wrong. But the anger is interesting. Would that such anger be found for masses of injustice as it is for the singular.
Jul 18 2010
The hour is late.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
-Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, Dune
Night dreams through a moon age darkly
That the breath of something powerful is near
And it travels up the shattered road to eden
Breaking down the barrier of the fear
It stimulates the space that lies between us
Our two spirits through the senses of touch and feel
It maybe sanity that tells us what we’re feeling
But only love
Can tell us what is real
It’s not too late
East of edens gate
We’d rather learn to love than hate
Its tired and we’re getting late
The world is spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning
The hour is late
-Saruman, Lord of the Rings, the Twin Towers
Jul 12 2010
The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
A sense of identity has been lost, of common cause and belonging. What we, as liberals, are being asked to accept, is what is called pragmatism irrespective of any other value.
There is a tendency, adopted from Republicans, of disliking what they call “pessimism”, of what liberals might call acknowledging the problems confronting us and not only vowing, but actually doing, better. Optimism grounded in an idea that any disease, any fault, any depredation can be summarily cured. Cured by a religious faith, hope and belief, that despite what we were before, we can be better than we are. Bt that hope, that betterness, has to be grounded not only in a vow or a desire, but a practice of different approaches, of different values, of not accepting what always has been, but what could be.
What value optimism, without these things, this vow, this indomitable conviction to start today? What use, exceptionalism without substance and change grounded in “not today”?
To Republicans, pragmatism is all. To neoliberal, faux-Keynsian economists, pragmatism is also a holy value, but this is often reframed as incrementalism. It has gotten a bad name, this incrementalism. Justifiably so. What is incrementalism, the idea that things might get better in a world we can scarcely imagine, next to our deaths and the gradual death of the whole world?
Republicans are, we have been told, the devil.
But if Republicans are the devil, the people who use progressive rhetoric and turn tail and enact polices the Republicans might adore, are the deep blue sea.
Jun 27 2010
If you are gay, you are my brother.
If you are lesbian, you are my sister. If you are transgendered, then you are my brother or sister depending on what X or Y you prefer to identify with, or my sibling human.
It really is just that simple. This is above and beyond your partisanship. If you are a Log Cabin Republican, I embrace you. If you are an A List gay, and the HRC is your bread and butter, I might disagree with you and your tactics, I might even call you craven, but I embrace you nonetheless.
And, please, forget whatever else I have maybe said in the distant (or not so distant, I evolve quickly in blog-time) past. Because, to find something different in anything I have said, you would have to reach back, years in time. Or maybe just A year. Hah. Like I said, we evolve quickly in blog time. And this is not just during gay pride month.
I have heard pride talk and yearnings, and intellectualizations about oppression.
It is to be said, if you are my republican gay brother, some among us would not want to piss on you if your hair was on fire.
I might have been one of those who said this.
I take it back.
Because of this. If we are to evolve in the gay community, beyond our mutual oppression, then we have to form a mutual solidarity.
Gay pride is more than about just pride. It is more than about seeing, in a metaphorical sense, in the gay community, whose sexually stimulative parts are bigger.
It is also about power. The power, as a small minority of people, to get some control of our lives and push back against the forces arrayed against us.
And, there has been some rumbling about whether the fights we are having are worth having, or are instead oppressing other people within the broad spectrum that is the LGBT community.
But, here’s the thing.
I wish for you to have all the options open to you that heterosexual society offers. This is not surrender, or mainstreaming, or assimilation.
It is options, and working toward the day when the broader society sees us as nothing but people. That is all.
And to have options, we as a community have to get over our bitchiness, our self important sense of alienation from one another, and to, with great consternation and difficulty, learn to accept EACH OF US as we are.
I dislike, as a general rule, bootlickers. I don’t want, or like, people who lick the boots of people who wish to hold us back or oppress us.
This is why (again, as a general rule), I find it very difficult to accommodate gay people who, for whatever reason, find it preferable to foment irrelevant argumentation, or spurious support of people who might not always have our best interests at heart.
Jun 27 2010
Rain falls in Imladris
The year 1998 was the year of eternal autumn for me. Now, it feels like those days are here again.
It’s raining here. Water world, Caladan … Global warming run amuck. Is here the last bastion of humanfolk? The last bastion of the free people of middle earth?
Our climate is changing. I have lived here all my life, and I can feel it. As the economy dredges, one hundred years to a halt, here, the Rocky Mountain High, is becoming a temperate rain forest.
And I think .. Rivendell. The autumn leaves swirl. From my childhood, I can smell the smoke of burning leaves. Burning pine needles as our forests turn brown with the ravages of the pine beetle. Burning leaves. It’s a smell from my youth, from innocuous and unknowing people and causes, plying the results of their uncaring into the atmosphere. But I remember it fondly, alongside the acrid diesel of the airport. The end of days, the burning leaves, the hubris of human technological triumph. Twinned in complex carbon compounds.
Last refuge in the dying light. Perhaps. Perhaps elsewhere.
Seven billion people. And callousness. The earth has 7 times 70 billion ants .. but they work together, in colonies, and the bones of their evaporation feeds the earth.
Rain fall. Light grows dim. The comfortable grab the remaining tidbits in the dregs of the hot afternoon, while clouds build and those inclined yell at them.
How will we survive the dying of the light? Will we make greenhouses, to feed the last few? Will we establish a bastion against the darkness? Will we stand?
Jun 22 2010
Question, why do Democrats seem to think
that expressing support for things is the exact same thing as doing them?
I’m frustrated. Every day, somewhere in the blogosphere, there is something that talks about the plight of the LGBT community. Or support for energy independence, for holding BP accountable. And, dutifully, people will be mournful and sad at how poorly people are treated.
Now, how bout those Knicks?
At the same time, there is no frustration and no little apologia for people in power who have utterly no intention of doing anything about these things.
So I ask .. is it cultural? What is it about the Democratic Party mindset that makes it think that sentiment is as good as actually doing something? President Obama is famous for this.
All the while, the far right shrieks and Democrats profess bemusement at why they are “so angry”. Uh, they’re not angry — they’re CALCULATING. They’ve discovered that if they go nuts and hold a grenade and threaten to hold their breath until they turn blue, the Democrats and Obama will try to find some middle ground between what is sane and the far right’s crazy game.
Now the homophobes want to put us in prison and have us executed. The rank and file Democrats say the homophobes are crazy.
What the Democrats in power are about is splitting both ends against the middle and the far right KNOWS THIS. Why is the far right not to think that, in a similar manner to energy policy, Obama will not just seek “ideas” from the far out freaks who want to kill us?
Maybe a good middle position is that we should just be forced to apologize in public for being gay .. that’s somewhere between prison and execution and full legal rights, right? Maybe gay men and women in the military should simply apologize for the temerity of daring to try to serve their country while gay.
After all, this is a middle ground between killing us and letting dogs gnaw on our corpses, and treating us as equal human beings. Why not? When you split all ends, no matter how calculatingly nutso, against the artificial middle, there is no reason for the ends not to get even more nutso.
And maybe a middle ground between destroying the Gulf and apologizing to BP, and energy independence, would just be converting everything over to methane, eh, and giving those very same companies the pass and the profits?
It works so well for them. I truly wish, though, people wouldn’t bitch and scream and cry about that which they have enabled for decades and continue to enable.
Jun 14 2010
The Urban Commune – an idea whose time has come?
On this blog, it is interesting to me that we talk about the environmental problems that face us. We talk about new structures and new paradigms, and we talk about how to handle certain deep problems facing our society such as transportation — but to me one huge basic answer to all of these questions is the urban commune.
One of the conclusions that has been largely reached by several people on this blog is that the answers, some feel, do not devolve to the traditional issues of national politics. That, in other words, to really solve the deep systemic problems inherent in the American political system is to address the local issues each of us face.
This is not an either/or — to say that we must address sustainable living and engender a better model for living is not therefore in direct opposition to the ideas involved in how to change our political system for the better. However, a gradual realization has dawned that there is a yin/yang relationship in terms of top-down political action versus bottom-up action. If we live in a certain manner as to make our government respond to that way of living, they will. Most of us work for corporations. Most of us have interests involved in basic living that are or may be at odds with what we think would be a better model of living for the future. On the other hand, if our politicians have constituents who have already changed their way of living in some degree — that if they adopt, for example, community living as a way of life without their assistance, it would be more in our politicans interests to cater to those constituencies that have already been pre-created.
It strikes me that we talk very little about the most basic problem facing all of us — that is, how to live in such a way as to weather the crises confronting our society and how to emerge whole.
I have lived, very briefly, on a commune. It is not my purpose, however, to put myself up as an expert of any kind on this subject. My experience was long enough to gather and internalize some of the concepts, but short enough that I don’t consider myself well endowed to do anything on the level of proselytizing.
It is more my purpose to open a conversation on this subject. If we on this blog wish to address New Structures, a new way, therefore, to address our problems, what can be more basic than to talk about how we live, and to think about and contribute our ideas about communal living as an opener to that very basic conversation?
Jun 13 2010
No.
Just, no.
No. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever. We will never surrender. Not EVER. We will fight on the land, we will fight on the sea, we will fight inside your minds, we will fight inside your souls, we well fight on the beaches we will fight on the lands we will fight in space, we will fight EVERYWHERE .. we will fight no matter what you do, and no matter who you adopt. We will NEVER STOP.
We will fight you in your homes. We will fight you over your families. We will fight you over your lands. We will fight you over your airs. We will fight you over your elitism. We will fight you over the cost of your lives. We will fight you over the cost of our lives. We will fight until we cannot fight anymore.
We will FIGHT.
You have tried to convert us and ours to the way of heterosexuality. This is unacceptable.
This is, to us, a Gay Nation.
We have, as you and yours have said, a New Structure.
The first step in any such new structure is, we will fight.
We MUST fight.
We cannot give, to you, and to yours, the luxury of a hundred years of incrementalism.
If we do, that will mean a million people kicked out of the military.
If we let you and yours speak on our behalf, that will mean a million gay people convinced that without heterosexuality, they are irretrievably damaged and worthy of DEATH.
If we let you and yours speak on our behalf, that will mean that you will continue to believe that I and ours are estranged, that we are not of you and the human species, and that you will continue to be able to believe that only a special class of human is ever able to enact on your behalf.
But, in any event, we are not worthy of DEATH.
We are not worthy of being unregarded by you worthies for our lives and our sustenance.
So, if necessary, we will fight you.
And, if necessary, we will break you.
It is a self destructive aphorism that gay people are merciful. It is a convenient delusion that gay people are going to grant you sufferage.
No.
We will break you. If must and needs be.
So, we will push you and push you and push you, until you break. How important is global warming to you against gay people’s civil rights? How important is jobs?
Until we have our civil rights, we will punish you. We are not done. We will hound you mercilessly. We will take your every excuse, your every attempt to divide and conquer, and turn it against you.
We will not stop until we are equal. Get used to it. And think. For god’s sake, think.
Jun 10 2010
BP thinks it’s being treated unfairly.
According to the Guardian:
There were signs last night that BP was heading for a showdown with the administration over the issue. A BP source told Reuters that “at some point a line has to be drawn”.
The issue is over paying oil workers who have stopped work because Obama and Salazar have suspended deep water oil drilling because of a disaster Caused by BP.
This amid word that BP treated U.S. regulations about disaster cleanup plans as a total joke, made shit up about disaster preparedness in total mockery and contempt for the weak and infested American government that smiled on its perfidy, and that BP is delaying claims so that claimants go out of business before they can collect.
I agree. A line has to be drawn. But not by BP.
You see, I think that the media is all wrong. Obama doesn’t do anger well and we shouldn’t be looking for him to do it.
However, as we have seen with Obama’s treatment of his allies and voters in the gay community, he does Darth Vader very well.
Perhaps he can treat his enemies as well as he treats his friends.
“Perhaps you think you’re being treated unfairly, BP?”
How about this? How about we debar you from the United States, Seize your assets, Nationalize your Shit, Imprison your Executives, and then Sell off the Loot to Pay for the Damage you have Caused?
Good. It would be unfortunate if we had to leave Imperial stormtrooper National Guard garrisons on your rigs and at your headquarters.
We have altered the deal. Pray we don’t alter it any further.
May 30 2010
Your political careers
–cross posted at Daily Kos
You, the 535 members of Congress – I’m talking to you. You, President Obama, I’m talking to you too. And you, the people who think the futures of you in Congress or you, President Obama, is so deathly important that you have to be defended to the death, I’m talking to you, as well.
Your political career is not more important than the Gulf.
Your political career is not more important than the killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Your political career is not more important than the thousands or millions of people who will die between now and when Health Insurance Reform is supposed to clean up the country. And your political career is not more important than a public option to ensure all people can get decent affordable Health Care.
The Insurance Companies are not your constituents. The People are.
Your political career is not more important than those of the thousands of honorably serving GLB veterans serving in the military.
Your political career is supposed to be about the People.
There are people who care more about your political career than the species that will die in the Gulf. There are people who care more about your political career than the lives lost and the livelihoods lost and to be lost because of the excrement smearing of a whole section of the planet by soulless people who don’t give a shit if the whole world dies, as long as they can have their creme brulee and if they can continue to party with bigwigs in Washington.
There is one word, and only one word, for those who care more about any one of you than any one of these things.
SHAME.
May 25 2010
Diabolical Compromise
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen — Barack Obama is about to fulfill yet another campaign promise!
(Pregnant pause, whilst heralds blow trumpets and Obamatons fall over themselves in rapture)
White House Green Lights Repeal (of DADT)
Let the minstrels sing. Let church bells be rung throughout the land!
In the letter, Orszag wrote that “ideally” the Pentagon’s review of implementation would be completed before Congress takes legislative action, but adds, “the Administration understands that Congress has chosen to move forward with legislation now…”
Wait….wait Is that an actually an admission that the Obama administration never wanted, nor intended, to repeal DADT this year? That Barack Obama always intended to break his solemn word to the honorably serving GLBT soldiers and the rest of GLBT America?
But, never fear, Obama will keep his promise.
The language would not include a automatic nondiscrimination policy but rather will return authority of the regulations for open service by gays and lesbians to the Pentagon.
Ok, in the words of Margaret Cho, “That’s not what I meant!”. You mean, returning control of how and why gay people are drummed out of military to the very organization that has been witch hunting gays for 40 years?!