Vinegar and honey.
The whole point of building on the nines, as slinkP will tell you, was to increase the us, and that you can’t do by walking up to them and sneering and spitting and backhanding them in the face, telling them they’re idiots, full of shit and nonsense, signifying nothing. Find the common ground—it’s always closer than you think: enemy soldiers on the front lines will forever have more in common with each other than with their own generals. Find that common ground and show them the way to us. —Anything else is chest-thumpery, sound and fury, heat without light; aggrandizing the us. Not increasing it.
But sometimes—
Here’s the Yes on 36 site—the one that’s, you know. For kids. Check its hip air of faux defiance, its commodified dissent: “I won’t be redefined.” Check the language in the Q&A on 36: “Measure 36 puts very simple wording in our State Constitution saying marriage is only between a guy and a girl.” Check how open-minded they’re trying to be: “Hopefully all Oregonians are against discrimination. But Measure 36 is only about marriage.” Check the focus of the clippings in their morgue: “Support for same-sex marriage among youth is shallow and summed up in one of the young generation’s favorite words: ‘whatever,’ Stanton says.”
(Of course, you should also check the muddled mix of rough and smooth edges, the use of white-on-grey Trebuchet, the outdated, washed-out rave flyer colors, the Gen X nostalgia-trip Fisher-Price rip in the logo, the awkwardly obvious stock photography and off-the-shelf clipart. You should meditate on why the promotional videos might only be available in Windows and RealPlayer formats. You should view the source and ask yourself what webdesigner worth their salt would use tables for something like this. But hey.)
This is honey, from a comb that’s slick and sophisticated enough. Conn Creative may be a small shop, but it’s a small New York shop, and that alone is enough to suggest this wasn’t ginned up by plucky volunteers with a passion for parttime politics. This them has a bankroll, and they’re using it in a bid to reach out and tear up Larry’s and Cshea’s marriage license, and they have the nerve to try and tell me it’s for my good—and they want so very badly to look hip while they’re doing it!
Gah. It’s the old paradox of contempt for contempt, intolerance of intolerance: I tell myself it would do no good to tell Conn Creative to sit down and be you silent, Christian; they would only stuff their ears with Leviticus and yammer “Sodom Sodom Sodom” till I gave up and went away. I tell myself it would do no good to show them the weddings that will not be stopped by this farce, and the families that will be hurt; they will swear up and down that they aren’t discriminatory, wouldn’t dream of it, that marriage is indeed threatened, oh yes, that this and this alone will save it. —I can’t find common ground with this moonshit bullshine. I have no honey to give them in return; all I have in my mouth is vinegar. All I can do is spit, and sneer. Thump my chest. Throw off some heat, no matter how dark I seem.
This amendment—if it passes—is written on tissue paper. It won’t last the decade. We will unwrite it, one way or another, and one day Larry and Cshea will once more be as married as Jenn and me, and just about everyone who ever spoke prominently in favor of 36 will shift and look away and change the subject whenever it’s brought up; if pressed, they’ll write it off as youthful exuberance, as having been caught up in the spirit of a time and a place. One or two of them might have the class to apologize for what they did, but most will just shrug: it all worked out for the best, didn’t it? You got what you wanted. Thank God it’s over and done with.
—Wouldn’t it be so much better to beat them back this year?
If this were a joke, I’d laugh, if it were funny.
The Portland Tribune has a front-page piece this week about the apparent 57% majority here in Oregon who favor Measure 36, which will amend the state constitution to define valid marriages as being only those “between one man and one woman.” The headline reads: “Voters back off from big changes.”
Sorry. Should have warned you to put your coffee down, first.
Look, there’s a sense in which this is true: for over 150 years, the Oregon constitution had language explicitly privileging whites, and retained outdated sections which set up such prohibitions that “no free negro, or mulatto, not residing in this State at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this State, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; and the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such negroes, and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the State, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the State, or employ, or harbor them.” —We ripped that language out back in 2002, with Measure 14; so, in a sense, in this one sense, Measure 36—returning, as it does, a measured dollop of discrimination and bigotry to our state constitution—can be read as voters backing away from that 2002 change.
But in every other sense. The obliteration of the legal status of thousands of marriages. The willful imposition of a majority’s bigotry, hatred, and fear on a harmless minority. The appalling ignorance with which we’re setting out to second-class our friends, our neighbors, our families. The conversion of the state certificate that seals my marriage from an implicit mark of privilege to an explicit badge of shame.
These are very big changes indeed, that 57% of the state apparently wants to visit on the rest of us.
And so, in all these other senses, the Portland Tribune ought to hang its collective head in shame at such a misleading lede.
I’ll guarandamntee you this, though: if it passes, it’ll be one hell of a lot less than 150 years before we rip this putrid amendment out. It’s gonna make your head spin, how fast we dustbin this bullshit.
Which side are you on?
Then there’s the days I think it all breaks down as easy and simple as pie:
- Democrats depend on registering as many people to vote as possible.
- Republicans depend on preventing as many people from voting as possible.
Give me but one firm spot on which to stand—
Swiftly kicked pants for morale unite! Me, I’m still trying to scrape something together, so it’s a good thing Dylan’s on the ball. Here’s the sweet spot:
Robyn commented afterward that the strange thing about this campaign is the less you pay attention to it, the more you somehow assume it’s doing badly, that Kerry is a popsicle stick, that somehow everybody really does just buy into the blatantly painful things this administration has bungled in the past four years.
And then everytime you actually stop to consider it, to actually listen to this guy, you go:
Who the hell was it said we were down on the mat? Screw this Curse of the Bambino mindset, I don’t want to wait till next year.
I want to hear the words President John Kerry was sworn into office today, I want this country to rejoin the planet Earth, I want national forests and fuel alternatives and united allies and goddamned better health care than this corporate bleeding machine we have now.
I want terrorism to decrease because we’re aiding the Middle East instead of exploiting it, I want AIDS funding worldwide, I want couples, no matter what their chromosome tally, to be able to raise children and own houses and go to work without being terrified it will all be taken away.
I want to stop seeing blocks of red and blue, I want a conservative party whose causes I respect with freedom to dissent, I want a liberal party not afraid to be exactly that, and I want moderates to bridge the gap and small parties to give us all a good sock in the nose now and then.
I want American kids to be taught to eat good food, I want schoolteachers to be paid like doctors instead of like dishwashers, I want a strong and able military but one which no longer cancerously devours billions of unnecessary dollars.
I want women to keep their hard choices about childbearing between themselves, their doctor, and their own conscience. I want my library record to be between me and my librarian, I want a working class that doesn’t sell itself out to culture war charlatans in fear, I want solid jobs that are for the good of America and not the board of executives.
Read the rest. Then go! Move the world!
Platitudinum.
All unbeknownst, Messrs. Nielsen Hayden and Humphries are rendering my latest self-indulgence obsolete. Go: present your pants: be swiftly kicked.
M.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
—“Dulci et Decorum Est,” Wilfred Owen
Sweet and meet, motherfuckers. Sweet and meet.
His life with the ghosts of Bush.
In the spirit of Roy Edroso’s unhealthy (but amusing; yea, amusing unto death) fixation on that perennial reactionary empowerment fantasy, “Life Among the Liberals,” I offer up this link to Rick Perlstein’s “The Church of Bush,” which I missed the first time out—despite the fact that he’s reporting on life among Portland conservatives. (Thanks to the Slacktivist for calling it to my attention.)
Elucidating the differences in approach is perhaps best left as an exercise for the reader. Wouldn’t want to spoil all your fun.
—Bruce Broussard, by the way: most recently famous for suing to get Multnomah County to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Despite his righteous outrage, it was found he didn’t have standing. Just one more way activist judges and the liberal media and that darn fascist homosexual agenda are conspiring to oppress true Americans.
Forget 15%; try 90%.
And so I’m feeling shitty about the (yes, irrational) analogy that finishes off the rant below, which was on shaky ground to start off with, proceeded with some little rhetorical deftness to a point of questionable taste, and never got around to any sort of disclaimer or safety instructions; just chuck the whole thing before it gets out of hand, okay?
Because Barry points us to this New Yorker piece which reminds us all that squabbling over 3% here and 11% there has nothing to do with actually winning elections and everything to do with stoning apostates and kicking the exiles’ bread and salt into the ashes: makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something for about five minutes, and then what?
Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that “2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet” as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.
The at-once depressing and uplifting moral to take from all of this is simply to realize: voting is terribly important. It’s absolutely vital. It’s also the least important thing we can do, politically.
Your blind item for the day.
X can’t say that because he evidently does not believe that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. He and his handlers portray him as virtually perfect in the past and omniscient in the present. In and of itself, that’s also not unusual: it’s so hard for a presidential candidate not to get puffed up when laudatory remarks follow him as closely as Secret Service agents. But do we want a president who pretends that he can do no wrong and never has?
Okay: who’s X? And what color is the sky in the writer’s world?
Answers not so much below the fold as over yonder, in your Talking Points Memo.
Dispatches from the War on Common Sense.
Apparently, any protestor who breaks the law during the Republican National Convention in New York City should be treated as a terrorist, and prosecuted accordingly.
Update! These terrorist acts will include releasing swarms of mice, giving false directions to “little blue hair ladies from Kansas,” throwing pies, and encouraging prostitutes with AIDS to seduce Republicans without condoms.
Man, I miss New York.
Every single one a youse can just go straight to hell.
Yeah, I know. It’s irrational. Maybe I’m tapped; maybe all my moonlight’s drained away. Normally I’m as waffly as they come, if by “they” you mean terminally indecisive eldest children who in their zeal to make nice between all the various factions that tug and push their lives end up seeing the merit to every possible point of view and never really finding some floor for their own feet that stays safe and stable for long. I mean, there’s no way under the sea or over it that I’m going to vote for Nader this year, but I’m not about to apologize for having done so in every election since 1992, and if I can recognize there’s something sky-pied arrogant about the whole enterprise of third parties in American politics, well, still: something’s got to be done, right? If the Democratic party is assured of my vote no matter what, because where else am I gonna go, well, why should they ever listen to me? (When was the last time I ever tried to tell them something?) And if there’s more than a little irrationality and nose-slicing spite in the vituperative hatred of Nader players that gets to strut down the Democratic catwalk with depressing regularity, well, the comfort I take in knowing that my Nader votes did nothing to steal electoral votes from the Democrats I was trying to message is a cold and hollow comfort, indeed. (I’ve got little enough time as it is for the things I need to do to keep my own life on track. How else can I help steer the ship of state?)
And if my sudden flirtation with the lesser of two evils has more to do with where we all are now than any yawning gap between 1992-me and 2004-me, well, 1992-me is still pissed. Every election is a crisis. It’s always never the right time to rock the boat. That this election is demonstrably the most critical of my voting life, if not the past 50 years, if not the past 100—that the boat has already fucking capsized, and we’re all paddling about, doing our best to right it in heavy seas—it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. 1992-me still wants his fuck-you vote. And if you maybe think 1992-me is as spoiled and wrong-headed as he is idealistic and righteously frustrated, well, I’d probably agree with you; then again, you don’t have to live with him.
Like I said: irrational. I mean, very little good can come of the white-hot rage that lights up my skull and leaks out of my eyeballs when I read something like this in a recent poll of registered voters:
Can I repeat that? —In the here and now, this current situation, with a choice between—
- a manifestly incompetent boob who’s crashed the country, looted our treasury, smeared our reputation with blood and shit, done his damndest to restrict our speech and our freedom of association—not out of any actual desire to keep us actually safe, but merely to score feel-good points in the polls; who sees no fault at all in claiming to be above the law, and has seized upon the most craven and dishonest means to keep us all split and squabbling, at each other’s throats, so that his outnumbered and outgunned faction can hold onto power just that much longer, squeeze that much more money from our pockets to his—
- and John Kerry—
15% of all registered Democrats are seriously considering the boob. Margin of error somewhere just north of plus or minus three percent, but hey: line up seven random registered Democrats. Chances are good that one of them is planning on voting for Bush. (Back in 2000, when Democrats were suffering Clinton fatigue, and hated wooden, beta-male, earth-toned Gore, who lied about the internet and lied about Love Canal [and Story], back when we weren’t all seized with knee-jerk treasonous Bush-hatred, Bush scored 11% of the Democratic vote. And maybe that’s a good argument for taking this LA Times poll as a sport, a freak, an outlier, and maybe tomorrow I’ll feel like grasping this slender reed, but right now I’ve got a head of steam on, so siddown and shaddap.)
But that white-hot rage is fucking irrational. What do I want, unswerving, unthinking party loyalty? (Well, a crushing landslide defeat, with all of us on the one side, and the five percent of those wealthy enough to benefit from Bush on the other—minus those human enough to feel guilty about their perks; plus a smattering of white men so stupefied by the creeping loss of what they see as their due that they can’t vote their own self-interest. Three percent of Republicans are considering Kerry, by the way. Plus or minus something slightly north of three percent.) —I mean, tag the Democrats themselves for this? They’d just panic and go haring after that mythical rightward nudge, the fatted calf to sacrifice that would bring all those chimerical NASCAR dads and soccer moms back into the fold. Which is beyond stupid: the problem isn’t that we’re too far left, for God’s sake. On every single issue you care to name, from abortion to child care to health care to education to the Wars on Drugs and Terra, we win. Our positions are the positions the majority wants; our direction is where the country wants to be heading. (What “we,” kemo sabe?) —But that’s not the choice people think they’re making. They think they’ve got these two options, this guy, and that other guy. And if one of the guys seems a little rank to them, what with the French and the yacht and the ketchup and the stuff about how maybe he lied but it’s all so confusing and it happened thirty years ago so who knows, fair and balanced, remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt he waffles, you know, and so, gee, I don’t know, I guess what’s left then is this other guy, and hey, steady leadership, right? Times of change?
Tacking right doesn’t do a goddamn thing except amp up the talk about waffling.
There’s a rule of thumb about schizophrenia and psychosis that I heard somewhere, and while I have no idea how actually useful it is, it stuck with me: psychosis can be seen, largely, as atypical, abnormal reactions to normal, present stimuli; schizophrenia, on the other hand, is (again, largely) reacting normally and typically to stimuli that just aren’t there, or don’t map reality in a terribly accurate fashion. And while there’s a lot of psychotic “I’d never vote for a guy who said we committed atrocities in Vietnam” (when we did, and anyway, your other choice is a deserter who lied about serving in the US Air Force) or “I’m not voting for a guy who’s going to raise my taxes” (when he won’t if you’re with about 95% of the country, and you’re going to pay the other guy’s tax bill in more ways than you can possibly imagine)—what I want to believe, what I hope, what must be true is most of that 15% (that 11%, that 49%, that 47) is schizophrenic: making the best choice you can from a field of factoids and stories and opinions that have little to nothing to do with what’s really going on, what you really want, life as it’s actually lived, and governing as it’s actually done. Because, while the psychosis makes me want to leave the country, the schizophrenia we can do something about. With a lot of hard work and deft argument and careful organizing and speaking clearly and openly and honestly and without a lot of rancor and spite and anger about where we are now and where we ought to be going and how it is we think we’re going to get there: offering new opinions, new stories, facts instead of factoids. The odds are against us, but the world as it is is for us, and we can get it done, and a lot of bitching and moaning and white-hot recriminating rancor doesn’t help. It’s irrational.
Still.
15.
Anybody sneers about Nader spoilers anytime soon, I’m gonna give ’em such the smack.
(And then promptly apologize, I’m sure. Gah!)
How you can tell our media isn’t “liberal.” (#7,536,062 in an ongoing series.)
Fred Clark doesn’t write a weekly column for the New York Times.
How do you do. Welcome to the human race. You’re a mess.
Better bloggers than I have ripped into the Washington Post’s shockingly deficient mea culpa for cheerleading us into an invasion of Iraq—but there’s this one bit that just won’t leave me alone:
Across the country, “the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones,” [Executive Editor Leonard] Downie [Jr.] said. “We didn’t pay enough attention to the minority.”
You know what I have to say to that?
This is what I have to say to that.
500,000 in New York City.
100,000 in Seattle.
30,000 in Los Angeles.
10,000 in Philadelphia.
200,000 in Washington, DC.
200,000 in San Francisco.
20,000 in Portland.
3,000 in Chicago.
To say nothing of Akron and Amarillo, Anapolis Royal, Antigonish, Arcata , Armidale, Asheville, Ashland, Athens, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Barrie, Beavercreek, Bellingham, Billings, Biloxi, Binghamton, Birmingham, Bisbee, Blacksburg, Bloomington, Boise, Boulder, Brampton, Brandon, Burlington, Butler, Calexico, Calgary, Canmore, Canton, Cape Cod, Cape Girardeau, Capt. Cook, Carbondale, Castlegar, Cedar Rapids, Charleston, Charlotte, Charlottetown, Charlottesville, Chatanooga, Chico, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Coburg, Colorado Springs, Columbia (Missouri and South Carolina), Columbus, Comox Valley, Concord, Cornwall, Corpus Christi, Cortez, Corvallis, Croton-on-Hudson, Cowichan, Cumberland, Dallas, Dayton, Daytona Beach, Deland, Denton, Detroit, Dubuque, Durango, Ellensburg, Elkins, Encino, Erie, Eugene, Fairbanks, Farmington, Fayetteville, Fillmore, Findlay, Flagstaff, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Smith, Fort Wayne, Fredricton, Fresno, Gainesville, Galesburg, Galveston, Geneva, Grand Junction, Grand Prarie, Grand Rapids, Hadely, Hilo, Holland, Honolulu, Houston, Hull, Huntington, Huntsville, Indianapolis, Ithaca, Jasper, Jefferson City, Jersey City, Johnston, Juneau, Kamloops, Kansas City, Kelowna, Kezar Falls, Kingston, Knoxville, Lafeyette, Lancaster, Lansing, Las Cruces, Las Vegas, Lawrence, Leavinsworth, Lethbridge, Lexington, Lilloet, Lincoln, Little Rock, Long Beach, Louisville, Macomb, Madison, McAllen, Meadville, Medicine Hat, Medford, Melbourne, Memphis, Minneapolis, Miami, Midland, Milwaukee, Minden, Mobile, Moncton, Montpelier, Mount Vernon, Nanaimo, Naples, Nashville, Nelson, New Orleans, Newark, Niagra, Norfolk, North Bay, Olympia, Orange, Orangeville, Orillia, Orlando, Ottawa, Palm Desert, Parker Ford, Parry Sound, Pensacola, Peoria, Peterborough, Phoenix, Pittsboro, Plattsburg, Portland (Maine), Port Perry, Portsmouth, Qualicum Beach, Racine, Raleigh, Richland Center, Riverview, Rockford, Rolla, Sackville, St. Augustine, St. Catherines, St. Charles, St. Joeseph, St. Louis, St. Paul, St. Petersburg, Salem, Salt Lake City, Saltspring Island, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, Sandpoint, San Jose, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, Santa Monica, Sarasota, Sault Ste. Marie, Savannah, Sherbrooke, Silver City, Sioux Falls, Sitka, Sonora, South Bend, South Haven, Spokane, Springfield, Starkville, St. John’s, Sudbury, Summertown, Tacoma, Tallahassee, Taos, Tehachapi, Temple, Thornbury, Tofino, Truro, Tulsa, Tucson, Valdosta, Vallejo, Vancouver, Watertown, Wausau, West Palm Beach, Wilkes-Barre, Williamsburg, Williamsport, Williamstown, Wilmington, Yakima, Yarmouth, York, and Youngstown.
Or 25,000 in Vancouver, Canada. 100,000 in Montreal. 10,000 in Toronto. A million in London. Two million in Rome. A million and change in Barcelona. 100,000 in Paris. 500,000 in Berlin. 100,000 in Dublin (30,000 in Belfast). 35,000 in Stockholm. 150,000 in Melbourne. 100,000 in Sydney. 200,000 in Damascus. 10,000 in Beirut. 100 in Mostar, Bosnia. 25,000 in Baghdad.
Eleven million, around the world. That’s what I have to say to that.
Here’s something else:
Good journalism—in a newspaper or magazine, on television, radio or the Internet—enriches Americans by giving them both useful information for their daily lives and a sense of participation in the wider world. Good journalism makes possible the cooperation among citizens that is critical to a civilized society. Citizens cannot function together as a community unless they share a common body of information about their surroundings, their neighbors, their governing bodies, their sports teams, even their weather. Those are all the stuff of the news. The best journalism digs into it, makes sense of it and makes it accessible to everyone.
Only I didn’t say it, of course.
Leonard Downie Jr. said it. The aforementioned Executive Editor of the Washington Post.
There’s a whole wide world out here, Mr. Downie, and we sure could use some help making sense of it all.
Do let us know when you come out into it.
Here in the United States, for many months it was considered anti-social if not unpatriotic to even broach one’s disagreement with the administration during these troubled times. I believe that yesterday began to fundamentally change all that. Despite some of the unintentionally hilarious commentary by reporters and pundits, who appeared to be gobsmacked by the realization that Junior is not as universally beloved by “normal” Americans as he is by Sally Quinn’s email web ring, it is now quite obvious that Bush is not perceived by one and all as a heroic figure of Churchillian proportions, here or around the world. The sheer numbers of the protesters have given people permission to dissent without the threat of broad social opprobrium and if nothing else we are free of the notion that it is unpatriotic to criticize the President.
What’s next? The war with Iraq is a done deal and who knows what the aftermath will be. But, the real issue is this notion of aggressive American hegemony and the pathetic inability of the current administration to explain their goals in a believable fashion, bring our historical allies along or re-evaluate policies in light of changing circumstances. They have failed the test of a decent civilized superpower and they must go.
—digby, 16 February 2003
Satire closed on Saturday night.
Intelligence, of course, is just another instrument of war. And intelligence, like force, can only be used to a certain extent in any given situation. But a show of intelligence will instill an absolute dread of one’s investigatory powers in the terrorist mind. So while Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan could only accomplish so much as an actual source of hard intelligence—perhaps breaking up a terrorist cell here, exposing a plot there, assisting in the capture of bin Laden lieutenants there—as a show of intelligence, exposed and outed as an intelligence source, Khan is far more valuable—terrorizing the terrorists themselves. The Medium Lobster would not be surprised if Osama bin Laden himself were trembling in some dark cave, marveling at the well-oiled efficiency of the American intelligence apparatus, wondering how many other theoretical Khans were out there waiting to inform on him.
—the Medium Lobster, “A Show of Intelligence,” Fafblog!
However, two days later, another Reuters article allowed that maybe the leak wasn’t the tremendous screw-up the wire service had previously reported. “Terrorism experts,” the piece noted, “said the reasons for the release of Khan’s name could range from a judgment error to a sophisticated ploy designed to put al Qaeda on edge about the extent to which the network has been infiltrated by moles.”
—Lee Smith, “Does the US press know we’re at war?” Slate
Defending marriage.
One of the reasons maybe why I’ve been quieter than usual of late is Creeping Disaffection. When Multnomah County first began granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples (including a number of friends and acquaintances of mine), I said something not unlike the following:
It’s brilliantly savvy theatre—every marriage solemnized in this blazing spotlight (as opposed to the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, that have been solemnized in Unitarian and MCC congregations and liberal synagogues and in the sitting rooms of bed and breakfasts and barefoot on the beach; wherever straights have gotten married, gays and lesbians have as well, for all you did to manage not to see them)—every marriage on the sidewalk outside the county offices in the rain with a news camera present puts a human face on this (thus far) largely abstract battle.
Gays and lesbians are an invisible majority, after all; the only time most of the country has to see them is acting up in sitcoms, or on the news, where every year the coverage of the pride parade skips over the gay police officers and the gay librarians and the gay government clerks and the gay senior citizens and the straight allies and zooms straight for the freakshow eyebite: the drag queen in the feather boa, the bare-breasted diesel dyke. (To trade in unfortunately broad stereotypes, which they do, of course; ignoring the obvious benefits these individuals bring to the world, which we shall take as read: we’re all choir here, for the most part, and this is going on too long already.) —Instead, the media has to focus on long lines of people just like everybody else lining up around the block for the same rights and the same dignity enjoyed by everybody else. Professionals and parents, besotted college students head over heels and sober old folks seeking recognition for half a century together, all of them just like everybody else, except—gay. (Meanwhile, in the background, a scattered handful of protesters behind yellow police tape holds up hateful signs. Radio pundits scream incoherently about intangibles, pushing buttons that don’t work as well as they used to. Respected conservative pundits in the field tell us we must oppress these people because gay sex is so much better than straight sex. It’s like heroin. No, really!)
(Which is why I’m not yet that worried about backlash this fall: Oregon is bigger than that, honest it is, and if the sky hasn’t fallen in because of same-sex marriages, we’ll leave well enough alone. —Always reserving the right to be bitterly disappointed, of course.)
Good thing I reserved that right. Oregon is not only not bigger than that, we’re downright petty little shits:
Not to be cynical or anything, but we’ve always sort of assumed that should the initiative to constitutionally outlaw same-sex marriage in Oregon get onto the November ballot, it was all over. Well, it seems that this afternoon anti-marriage forces submitted a record number of signatures:
Backers of a ban on gay marriage turned in more than 244,000 signatures Wednesday to place the issue before Oregon voters this fall. It was twice the number needed and the highest number of signatures ever submitted for an initiative measure in Oregon.
While there of course will be challenges to the initiative, the signature-gathering process, and the validity of signatures, the proposal needs only 100,840 valis signatures to qualify. That more than twice that number were submitted virtually guarantees that voters this Fall will have the option of enshrining discrimination and unequal protection into the Oregon Constitution.
Oh, there’s been good news since then, and one can always hop up on a soapbox and unleash a hail of thundering invective—and there’s nothing like stupid, heartless, thoughtless bigotry to fuel some truly inspired mockery. But it’s sound and fury in the face of implacable fear and ignorance, which will enshrine bigotry in our constitution and strip (largely theoretical, yes, but) rights from neighbors, friends, family members. And the certain knowledge that this is nothing but a freakshow reflex, a thrumming of nausea through the body politic that will pass and leave its fervent supporters and ridiculous logic clinging to the liner of the dustbin of history is cold comfort; it’s hard to look forward to yet another Measure 14 at some point in the years to come that will strip this foulness away (and we will pat ourselves on the back once more: isn’t great we’re so much better than we used to be?) when what we want is decency now, goddammit.
When I’m directly engaging whatever it is I’ve chosen as the Other Side of the Moment, I’ve lately been trying hard to keep Tarantino 25:17 in mind: I try, real hard, to be the shepherd. (Not least because it means I’m actually the tyranny of evil men, and the Other Side of the Moment is weak; we all need our power fantasies.) —It’s hard to make the Other Side of the Moment see the light when you’re sneering at them, and this is why 90% of all internet punditry is less useful than a hill of beans (at least you can eat the beans). But when it comes to the anti–same-sex–marriage crew, I’ve got nothing but a sneer. (I take some little solace in the fact that folks much better than I have lost their patience on this score—and quite eloquently, to boot.)
Now, if you’re a snowball that’s somehow chanced upon this particular hell, and you for whatever reason can’t countenance same-sex marriage, well, I’ll apologize for my sneer; I’m craven enough in my convictions to feel badly about doing it to your face. But you’re backing the wrong play, morally, historically, pragmatically—if you really want to defend marriage, for God’s sake, it makes much more sense to throw your weight behind something like this—
Stigmatize adultery. Roll back no-fault divorce. Rail against quickies, planned at midnight for a 1 a.m. wedding. I’ll still fight you tooth and nail, but at least I could have some little respect.
(Defend marriage? You pathetic, deluded fools. Same-sex couples have been getting married all around you for decades, and they’ll keep on doing it, long after you’ve passed your little amendment. Men will kiss their husbands as you clap yourselves on the back, and wives will continue to feed each other cake, whether you will it or no. They’ve always had the love and the cherish and the honor, and the recognition of their friends and family, and nothing you can do will take that from them. Nothing. All you’ll manage to do is rewrite the tax code. Make it more of a grinding hassle to deal with insurance and wills. Keep loving families apart at times of illness and accident and death. Condemn children to needless, nightmarish legal quagmires. You will tarnish all our rings, and when we open our mouths to take our vows, we will taste ashes. —In order to save marriage, you will destroy it. Fools.)
IOKIYAR.
Republicans in the House took more than 140 hours of testimony to investigate whether the Clinton White House misused its holiday card database but less than five hours of testimony regarding how the Bush administration treated Iraqi detainees.
—“Free Pass From Congress,” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.)
Oh, hell, one more political squib won’t hurt.
There’s been a lot of hot air bloviated about why John Edwards ought to be Kerry’s choice for second chair, and I’d link to it, but most of it’s over at Matthew Yglesias’s site, which is currently having Issues. Anyway, Matthew Baldwin just nailed the definitive argument. (Bonus: the second DVD has a priceless making-of documentary.)
