Why I am in the mood I am in,
or, Tin-foil hats for the sophistimacated.
Days like today? Seems like this—
The media makes pornography out of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our “entertainment” and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as a resellable commodity! I mean, you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!
—is the only possible explanation for this pending promotion—
[national security adviser Condoleezza] Rice and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz are the leading candidates to replace Powell, according to sources inside and outside the administration. Rice appears to have an edge because of her closeness to the president, though it is unclear whether she would be interested in running the State Department’s vast bureaucracy.
—the pending failure of this bit of terribly necessary compassionate conservatism—
Just over half of Alabama voters oppose Gov. Bob Riley’s $1.2 billion tax and accountability package, results from a new poll show.
Less than 30 percent of voters would vote to pass the package, with the rest remaining undecided, according to the poll conducted last week by The Mobile Register and the University of South Alabama.
The survey, conducted Monday through Thursday, polled 820 Alabamians who said they were either “very likely” or “likely” to cast a vote on the plan and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
—and the utter dearth of this sort of outrage outside of a small corner of the Islets of Bloggerhans—
A CBS News tally shows this is Bush’s 26th presidential trip to Crawford. He has spent all or part of 166 days at the ranch or en route—the equivalent of 51/2 months. When Bush’s trips to Camp David and Kennebunkport, Maine, are added, according to the CBS figures, Bush has spent 250 full or partial days at his getaway spots—27 percent of his presidency so far.Meanwhile other Americans are getting no time off from their job.
Stripped of his uniform and laid flat on his back in a first-aid tent, a wounded Army engineer fixed his wide, unblinking eyes on a flimsy overhead tarp that shielded him from the desert sun.
I could go on, but. (But.) What, after all, is the point when this is seen—by anyone, anywhere—as making a valid point, political or otherwise? (You see?)
All I know is, I still don’t have any whiskey.
The mindset in question.
A confession: I’ve never been a huge fan of Spider Robinson.
A fan favorite, and something of an acolyte of Robert Heinlein, he’s most famous for his short stories (and the occasional novel) set in and around Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon—a genial sort of place: the best bar near the big SF convention after the floor has closed; a sort of Northern Exposure-ish utopia small enough so that everybody knows your name, but big enough (in heart) that everybody can be his or her respective self, warts and all. (With SF puzzles, tropes, allusions, convoluted in-jokes, and horrible, horrible puns.) —Robinson is more naïve than he thinks he is, a raging sentimentalist operating under the mistaken assumption that he’s hard-boiled, but he’s got a way with words, and a more inclusive than not view of humanity, which excuses a lot in my book. “Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased—thus do we refute entropy”; and if celebrating that is hokey, well, we could all do with a little more hoke around here, from time to time.
But. And even though I knew he comes by a great many of his ideals via the aforementioned Heinlein (let’s just note I’m more partial to Disch and Delany and leave it at that), and that those ideals include more than a dollop of that attitude towards women mistaken by some as feminism but more usually noted as pedestalization—I was still taken aback to discover this particular Robinson quote:
Darling, all men think about rape, at least once in their lives. Women have an inexhaustible supply of something we’ve got to have, more precious to us than heroin… and most of you rank the business as pleasant enough, but significantly less important than food, shopping or talking about feelings. Or you go to great lengths to seem like you do—because that’s your correct biological strategy. But some of you charge all the market will bear, in one coin or another, and all of you award the prize, when you do, for what seem to us like arbitrary and baffling reasons. Our single most urgent need—and the best we can hope for—is to get lucky. We’re all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.
Now, there’s—largely speaking—two responses to this kernel:
- it’s basically true, if a bit overly heated—this is, indeed, the secret underpinning of the war between the sexes;
- it’s a prime example of the tragedy bred by that farce of sloppy thinking, evolutionary psychology—what a fuckin’ cop out.
(No points for guessing where I stand. Biology is not destiny, muthafuckah.)
Those two (largely speaking) responses help determine how people respond in turn to the news that Illinois has modified its definition of rape to include the following:
c) A person who initially consents to sexual penetration or sexual conduct is not deemed to have consented to any sexual penetration or sexual conduct that occurs after he or she withdraws consent during the course of that sexual penetration or sexual conduct.
Either: the stuff is more precious than heroin, and if she’s said “yes” there’s no use changing her mind, as that poor addled rapist-man couldn’t stop if his life depended on it; or good God, of course No means No, decent sex means being attuned to what your partner’s up to as well as yourself, and consent is not a binding oral contract, for fuck’s sake. (As it were.)
Do note we haven’t winnowed all the chaff by any means. There’s still grey areas a-plenty—the pedestalization that underlies l’difference that’s vived in the quote above has more than enough room for the concept of the chivalrous gentleman who damn well stops when his partner says whoa, and I’d never dream of suggesting that Robinson, say, would decry the Illinois law merely on the basis of said quote. (And on the other hand, there’s room enough for concern about the possibilities of abuse in the “what a fuckin’ cop out” camp. —And yet: even here, we find grey, we find fuzz, we find fog.)
But I now find myself in the need of fresh coffee. So.
The Further Adventures of Chickenhawk: Into the Kulturkampf!
So the Supreme Court astonishes everyone by doing the right thing and striking the Texas sodomy law from the books. Goes one further, even, and asserts a more robust right to privacy for all of us than we could have expected. And everyone wondered what the President’s reaction would be.
Sen. Santorum floats a trial balloon, and is roundly, soundly criticized for likening consensual homosexual relations with hot “man on dog” action. And everyone wondered what the President might have to say on the subject.
Pundits began to muse about the possibility of a split in the Republican party, between moderate, socially liberal(ish) swing voters and the rabidly bigoted hardcore conservative bloc—both necessary to a second four years of Bush. What would he do? they asked. How will he handle this dicey dilemma?
But through it all, the President and his various spokespeople remained silent.
Then, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll was released, showing a marked decline on the part of the American public in the acceptance of consensual homosexual relations and the right to marriage or recognition of civil unions for gays.
The President spoke right up.
“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another,” Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. “And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.”
How nice to know he has the conviction of his courage on this one.
Gresham’s Law in action.
Well, no, maybe not. But watch the numbers flicker by on this cost of war clock and see how every second drives more money into imperial dreams and the Halliburton Highway and out of ideas a sinking, poverty-stricken nation could use. —Or more usual nostrums, like health care, education, public housing…
Actually? Maybe so, but in another way. It’s a limb, but I’m willing to test its weight: maybe the whole idea of bad X driving out good X has a lot to do with this very visceral frustration, one that’s growing and souring in more bellies than mine. “Anyone who can beat Bush has my vote.” Jesus. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Shut up shut up shut up!
It’s not just Democratic representatives, trying to get a reading of a bill at the last minute before a committee vote. It’s also TV stations that dare to air ads critical of the President and scientists who can’t tell them what they want to hear. It’s even fellow Republicans who dare to deviate an iota from the party line. Hell, it’s even you and me and anyone else who wants to maybe try to get some sort of customer service from the folks currently occupying our White House. —Ah, well. At least we’re all of us in good company.
“—just one sentence—”
Okay, maybe I do wish we still had cable. This, from The Daily Show last night:
White House officials are telling me it strikes them as a little nitpicky. If it turns out that instead of Saddam Hussein trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons, Saddam Hussein was not trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons, I mean, that’s a one-word difference in a long, long sentence.
—Thanks to The Note.
This dog, on the other hand, will hunt.
Forget Wilkinson; that’s so yesterday. Gregory Thielmann is the real deal. The former director of the State Department’s bureau of intelligence, he had access to the raw materials that the administration used to build its case for war on Iraq. His conclusion?
“I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq.”
He conceded that part of the problem lay with US intelligence, but added: “Most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided.”
Demosthenes digs into Thielmann’s Rumsfeld Reprise? report and finds “faith-based intelligence” to have always been a tool of the Bush administration and its constituents—long before 9/11. From Thielmann’s report:
In recent weeks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has come under fire for his part in the Bush administration’s misuse of U.S. intelligence to justify the US invasion of Iraq. But Rumsfeld’s tendency to hype selective portions of intelligence that support his policy goals was already familiar to intelligence professionals. They remember his chairmanship of a 1998 congressionally chartered commission charged with evaluating the nature and magnitude of the ballistic missile threat to the United States. As with Iraq, Rumsfeld’s work on ballistic missiles often ignored the carefully considered views of such professionals in favor of highly unlikely worst-case scenarios that posited an imminent threat to the United States and prompted a military, rather than diplomatic, response. Just as is likely to be the case with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), time has proven Rumsfeld’s predictions dead wrong.
—Bolding courtesy Demosthenes. Go, read how and why. And then, if your outrage has merely been whetted, consider these devasting blows by way of Josh Marshall. First, about how the yellow cake got into the State of the Union in the first place:
It was in the speech for at least ten days prior to its delivery. And the appropriate people from all the key national security agencies and departments signed off on it.
Bartlett’s drawn the line pretty clearly, leaving only two real possibilities. Either the speech was intentionally deceptive or folks at the State Department and the CIA were guilty of some mixture of gross negligence and incompetence.
Second, what Secretary Rumsfeld has to say about the whole yellow cake flap:
Rumsfeld, in a terse exchange with Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., said he learned only “within recent days” that the Africa claims were based on faulty evidence. UN officials determined the documents were forgeries before the war.
And third, there’s Ari Fleischer, caught in an out-and-out lie:
Fleischer is lying—there’s no other way to describe it—about what Wilson’s report said to make it seem less significant than it was. (If Fleischer had said Wilson’s reasoning was flawed or his investigation incomplete, then you could say he was spinning or distorting. But saying he said something completely different from what he said means he’s lying.)
We were lied to—whether through Straussian mendacity or faith-based incompetence, it doesn’t matter; we were lied to, and we went to war because of those lies. Thousands of people died. People—“theirs” and “ours”—continue to die every day.
We have committed a horrible crime, and no amount of reeking cordite wafting from inside the Beltway will set it right.
That shaggy dog won’t hunt.
You know how you hear a story, and it fits with your gut instincts, your ideal read of the lay of the land, just snaps right in there like the missing puzzle piece the cat kicked under the sofa a week ago? It confirms what you know to be true, what you feel in your gut to be right, what you have the utmost faith will out when all is said and done? You know how you stop, just for a moment, and say to yourself, you know, self, this is just too good to be true?
Well, it usually is.
In other news, that Terrance J. Wilkinson guy? Who was saying all that stuff?
(See, if you hedge your bets when you go with that sort of story, and allow as how it might just be too good to be true, then pride doesn’t paint you into a corner and you don’t have to eat your words and you don’t end up saying such arrant nonsense as, “I think the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.” —I bet Ari Fleischer woke up Monday morning and said to himself, “I’ve just got a few days left until retirement!” Then his mirror broke and he spilled some salt at breakfast and then on his way to the White House when he was skipping out of the path of that black cat he ended up ducking under that ladder and, well.)
Yellowgate.
You’ve probably seen the transcript of Ari Fleischer’s mistakes-were-made-on-first performance yesterday. Josh Marshall sums it up nicely enough—
But let’s look at what the White House is saying. In essence, they’re saying that the Niger documents were forgeries. But then, we already knew that. Indeed, the White House has conceded this for months. Sometimes publicly; sometimes privately. Here’s what they’re saying now, according to the Post: “Knowing all that we know now the reference to Iraq’s attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech.”
But, of course, the real issue is that there is at least very strong circumstantial evidence that knowing what they knew then, the uranium hokum never should have been put into the speech either. This is a classic case of trying to jump out ahead of a story by conceding a point that no one is actually disputing in the first place.
Add to that (as noted by Calpundit and MetaFilter) this little piece of rhetorical dynamite—
An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisors urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union address.
“The report had already been discredited,” said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. “This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings.”
Bush’s response was anger, Wilkinson said.
“He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn’t prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could,” Wilkinson said. “He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country.”
This comes to us courtesy Capitol Hill Blue, a mostly libertarian political news site founded in 1994 (the oldest political news site on the web, they claim) by Doug Thompson. Capitol Hill Blue, while unabashedly right-wing on many social issues, is mostly known for taking on Congress—its series on “The Criminal Class” is something of a classic in the field—and Thompson is the sort of libertarian whose principles take him off the standard right-wing reservation from time to time.
Skepticism is the watch-word for the moment; very few people are all that familiar with Capitol Hill Blue, after all, and they do have more than a whiff of the tabloid about them, and anyway, nothing’s coming up on a Google for “Terrance J. Wilkinson.” (Not damning in and of itself, mind.) And this is red meat, here; this would be the linchpin—grenade pin?—for mainstream consideration of the “Bush lied people died” meme. —On the other hand, their source is named—which is far more than you can say about a lot of recent reporting from the New York Times, et al—and Doug Thompson is actively backing up his story in Blue’s comments boards. It should be a simple enough matter for the press corps to track Mr. Wilkinson down and confirm (or deny) this report of blood in the water.
Right?
Actually, I’m going to throw my meager weight behind “The Yellow Cake Scandal.” It’s nice and Teapot-Domey.
There has been, as they say, a development.
Mendacity.
For those tired of the he-didn’t-lie-he-only-exaggerated-and-anyway-it’s-presidential-to-exaggerate line on WMD and Iraq and imminent threat, here’s Orcinus, TomPaine.com, and Salon, setting out all the other lies that have come out of the Bush adminitration. So far. That we know of. To date. His own personal history, Al Gore, his plans for the budget, his tax cut, his Medicare proposal, when the recession started, the trifecta—remember the trifecta?—and more. Much more.
Oh, and if you do want more on the WMD front, there’s always the news that we went to war based on five-year-old intelligence. (You know, the same intelligence we used to justify and target Operation Desert Fox.) —It’s okay, though; Republicans such as Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, insist that they’ve seen intelligence “of highest classification” that would lead people to “clearly come to the conclusion that these weapons did exist, that they were in the hands of those who could use them, and thank God they weren’t used.”
—Also, the lurkers support them in email.
Taking the mile.
BoingBoing has totally ruined my morning. Though I suppose I should blame Decca Aitkenhead, the first journalist to visit Tranquility Bay since 1998. Part one of her report is here; part two is here.
Tranquility Bay is a boot camp in Jamaica for recalcitrant teens. Parents who can afford the tuition send misbehaving kids here to be reprogrammed. The overwhelming majority of the kids at Tranquility Bay come from the States, but the program overseeing the facility, WWASP, sees a potential new market in Britain’s misbehaving adolescents. Which is why they asked a reporter from the Observer to visit. —Also, Tranquility Bay hasn’t been too happy with coverage by the US media. From Aitkenhead’s piece, “The Last Resort”:
The owner is an American called Jay Kay. He doesn’t trust the media, because ‘they go for sensationalist stuff. Nothing has really presented things in a way that is factual.’ On the other hand, he believes anyone who saw inside Tranquility would support and admire it, and blames criticism on ignorance. So Kay has been in a dilemma. His business is expanding, and he is turning his attention to the UK, for he believes there is a large untapped market of British parents who would ship their children straight off to Jamaica if only they knew about Tranquility. The British government, too, he hopes, might send him children in its care. ‘If social services was interested, at $2,400 a month I bet they can’t offer our services for that.’
This spring he decided to grant me and a photographer unprecedented, exclusive access. If he didn’t like the result, ‘Hell will freeze over before anyone gets in here again.’
Oh, well.
Here’s Teen Advocates USA, “a private non-profit watch dog group focused on monitoring the care and treatment of youth by the privatized behavioral healthcare industry.” And here’s a site which focuses on Straight, Inc., but includes (a lot) of links to websites and resources dealing with the overall phenomenon of this nasty little front in the war on kids, including these scans of transcripts of testimony given by former Tranquility Bay residents Aaron Kravig, Lindsey Wise, and Nick Volante in the matter of Gina Farmer vs. William Mitchell. It also includes this January, 2003 US State Department advisory about offshore boot camps like Tranquility Bay:
The Department of State has no direct knowledge of the corporate or legal structure of these enterprises or of their precise relationship to each other, including ties to organizations in the United States. Though these facilities may be operated and staffed by U.S. citizens and populated primarily by U.S. citizen minors, the host country where the facility is located is solely responsible for compliance with local safety, health, sanitation, and educational laws and regulations, including all licensing requirements of the staff in that country. These standards, if any, may not be strictly enforced or meet the standards of similar facilities in the United States.
What sort of standards are we talking about, then?
Here’s a summary of some of Kravig’s testimony, as posted to this message board for graduates of such programs:
On July 6, 2001, the day after my 18th birthday, there was an incident involving (name withheld, staff member) and myself. The staff member talking to another student had seen me. The staff member had called me up to where he was sitting in the classroom and he asked me why I was talking. Before I could respond to him he told me that I was on “talking restriction” and that if I were seen talking I would be given a Category Three consequence. My one and only response to him was, “Yes sir, I will not talk anymore.”
The staff member then told me to go get my water bottle because I was going to “Observation Placement (OP)”. He took me to the room which held observation placement, made me lay on the filthy, bare tile floor and sat on my back. He then told the staff overseeing observation placement that if I were to speak that I should be “restrained”. I stayed in observation placement for twenty-one days for saying “Yes sir, I will not talk anymore.” For this whole period of twenty-one days I, being a legal adult, had the right to leave, and my parents would not make the arrangements for me to leave because they wanted to come down to the facility in Jamaica to try and convince me to stay. While in observation placement (op) you must lay down on the floor for the majority of the day, only getting up to shower, use the restroom, or for a five minute break every two hours. You were made to lie flat on your stomach with your head to the side, hands at your side, and legs flat on the floor. You could not have any padding under your head, or you would be given a consequence. You could not get up without the permission of the staff or you would be given a consequence. One day, we were threatened with five thousand jumping jacks if we were caught sleeping, and two people in the room were made to do this. The conditions of the room were horrendous. It was hot and humid enough, being July in Jamaica, and the “privilege” of having the windows was determined on the student’s behavior, which basically consisted of not speaking. The floor in the room crawled with what could only be described as pubic hairs, and we had to lie face down on the floor. We could not read any books at any time, and we were never allowed to do any school at all. The bathroom of the room was even worse. I have seen leeches swimming in the pool of water on the floor of the bathroom during my time in op. We were not allowed to close the door while we were showering or using the toilet. One night during my time in op, all the students in op were given the privilege of sitting up and because I had asked the staff who was supervising us a question and he told me to lay down. I asked him why and he called staff to come and restrain me. These staff took me to the next room, there were five in all, but I can only remember two of them (name withheld), and (name withheld). In the next room I was told to lie on the floor. When I did one staff pulled my feet together so my inner anklebones were flat on the floor and got sat on them using his knees, grinding my ankles into the tile floor. Two other staff grabbed my arms, put them straight out from my body and sat on them. It was like this for nearly fifteen minutes. These are methods used to control someone who is going out of control and may hurt themselves or others, not for asking a question. I had told the staff who restrained me before we had even gone into the room that I am eighteen and that they cannot touch me. They laughed at this. Every night in OP we were made to do fitness. This was led by the staff who supervised OP. Every night, the usual fitness routine would start with 3000 to 5000 jumping jacks, with a 30 second break to drink water after 1000 jumping jacks were completed. After this we were made to do about 1000 sit-ups, with a 30 second break after 100 had been done. The finale was to do anywhere from 300 to 1000 pushups, with breaks at every 100. Before we began fitness, the staff supervising the room would close all the windows and turn off the fan. The humidity and heat generated in the room would turn into a cloud of steam that only dispersed when all fitness was done, when the staff would open the windows once more. In the spot that I would do fitness at there would be a puddle of my own sweat where I was standing before fitness was done. While doing pushups, I would slip on my own sweat onto the tile floor, and have to get up and go on. My clothes would be drenched in my own sweat by the end. I had to do this for twenty-one days because I said, “Yes sir, I will not talk anymore.”
Of course, there’s a simple answer for how upstanding American parents could let their troubled kids get put through such an appalling wringer. They don’t. Back to Aitkenhead:
‘Sure, he complained like hell at first,’ [Jim Mozingo] recalls fondly. ‘Typical case of manipulation, just like they said in the handbook. He said the staff were mean and violent, they beat you, the food is terrible.’ He chuckles, pleased by the neat symmetry of the handbook and letters.
What sorts of things will land a teen in a place like Tranquility Bay? You know, the usual:
Drugs feature high among reasons for choosing Tranquility, although addicts who need detox are not accepted. Running away from home, sleeping around, or being expelled from school are also typical. Some kids have been in trouble with the police. Others had been in court, where their parents persuaded the judge to let them send their child to Tranquility, rather than issue his own punishment. Other students were sent here for wearing inappropriate clothes, using bad language, or hanging around with the wrong sort of friends.
Still, it’s hard to argue with satisfied customers.
While [Mazingo] is talking, Josh hovers nearby, with bright eyes that dance longingly on his father’s face. It took Josh a whole year to reach level 2, some of it spent in OP, but his father feels only awestruck gratitude for the treatment his son has received.
‘Every time I come here I’m just so struck by the love of these people. You can’t fake this kind of love. And this place is just full of love. I challenge anyone to come down and take a look.’
And:
Also striking is the assumption parents make of entitlement to their child’s affection, as though this is a legal right. ‘She’s a neat kid, she really is,’ a former student’s mother says. ‘She just didn’t like us.’ But now, ‘I don’t believe she’s lying to me any more, and that’s a neat feeling.’
Myself, I keep thinking of that note scribbled in pencil on toilet paper that V passes to Evey when Evey thinks she’s been caught and all is lost. It’s not a perfect rejoinder to this squalling, nasty mess, it’s complex and manipulative, and V’s putting Evey through his own nasty, squalling version of behavior modification, and I’m with Vidal on the whole ends/means thing, most days; there are no ends. Only means. And yet. I’m sitting here and I just can’t stop thinking about that damn note—
An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world that’s worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I don’t know who you are, or whether you’re a man or woman. I may never see you. I will never hug you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you.
George Washington slapped her.
No, not Avedon, silly. Ann Coulter. Who gets soundly slapped by Avedon, not George. —But remembering an old James Thurber joke is the most fun I’ve had yet when thinking of Coulter. So.
Our marriage does not need defending.
I don’t need to know that long-term gay couples are denied partnership benefits to feel secure in our marriage. It does nothing for my conjugal self to know that gay men and lesbians are routinely denied access to rights I myself am entitled to in any state of this union, like visiting my spouse in the hospital, and having some say in her care—knock wood—should she be so ill she is unable to speak for herself. Such as being covered as a spouse by her employer’s health plan. Such as—God forbid—the right for one of us to have a say in what happens should the other of us die.
It does not weaken my faith in our marriage one whit to think that men could marry other men, or women marry other women. I don’t think honoring their relationships as mine is honored will lead to the degradation of our bond. It is only basic human decency to honor every such long-term relationship equally in the eyes of the law; if anything, such equality would make me feel more proud, more secure, more entitled to the privileges of our marriage, not less. (I will not bother to answer the specious logic that gay marriage is a “special” right, because gay men have the same right to marry women, and lesbians to marry men, as the rest of us.)
Our marriage does not depend for its strength on the blessing of a church whose tenets I do not accept and whose faith I do not share. It is a compact between the two of us—of respect, and love; I got your back, babe. You are home to me—when you come to me, I will take you in. This I promise and swear. (It was also an excuse for a great party and a chance to lovingly scam a complete Fiestaware dinner set off relatives.) —And make no mistake: gay men and lesbians throughout this country already have all that. For all that they cannot sign a license in a city hall, they already have the heart of marriage, and it can never be taken from them. And their celebration of it and participation in it has done nothing, nothing at all, to weaken marriage. It has strengthened it, if anything.
To deny them, then, the legal recognition of their relationships, their basic equality before the law, is nothing more than mean-spirited pettiness. Is to cheapen the very idea of marriage, as rite of passage and, yes, as sacrament.
Look to your own marriage, Senator Frist, and defend it if you must.
But leave ours the hell out of it.
The verie best, and swetest liquor.
For as those, which serue in publik function do turn their learning to publik vse, which is the naturall vse of all learning: so such as liue to themselues either for pleasur in their studye, or to avoid foren truble do turn their learning to a priuate ease, which is the priuat abuse of a publik good. For the common weall is the measure of everie mans being, which if anie one respect not, he is not to liue in it.
—Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie, 1582.
The road to hell runs through the Arkansas legislature.
It could open up a can of worms, there’s no doubt about that. But our intentions were pure.
That’s Arkansas state Rep. Shirley Borhauer, a 76-year-old grandmother and former schoolteacher, on Arkansas’s latest law: Act 858, which modifies Arkansas Code § 5-68-502, rendering it unlawful to—
display material which is harmful to minors in such a way that minors, as a part of the invited general public, will be exposed to view such material… provided, however, that a person shall be deemed not to have displayed material harmful to minors if the… lower two-thirds (2/3) of the material is not exposed to view and segregated in a manner that physically prohibits access to the material by minors…
It also forbids allowing a minor to view, “with or without consideration, any material which is harmful to minors.”
You’ll be wanting to know how Arkansas law defines what is “harmful to minors.”
...that quality of any description or representation, in whatever form, of nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse, when the material or performance, taken as a whole, has the following characteristics:
(a)The average person eighteen (18) years of age or older applying contemporary community standards would find that the material or performance has a predominant tendency to appeal to a prurient interest in sex to minors;
(b)The average person eighteen (18) years of age or older applying contemporary community standards would find that the material or performance depicts or describes nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse in a manner that is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community with respect to what is suitable for minors; and
(c)The material or performance lacks serious literary, scientific, medical, artistic, or political value for minors.
Oh, well. That’s nice and precise, isn’t it. Hard to see how anyone could ever quibble over those terms.
Most of these quotes nicked from Newsarama’s excellent summary of what this dreadful law could mean for comics (“Best-case scenario—some kids may not get their hands on a Penthouse. Worst case—every single comic book retailer in the state is brought up on charges by the close of business Thursday”). There’s also the possibility that bookstores and libraries will have to set up “adults-only” sections, behind which they can hide such dangerous material as Of Mice and Men. And every librarian and small retailer in the state will have to stay up late with all their new acquisitions, vetting them, trying to figure out if some “average” Arkansas cop with an axe to grind, or DA with an election coming up, if one of them walks into the store and sees this out where minors can view it, will it land me in a ruinous lawsuit?
The ACLU is on the case, of course. The Times-Record has some coverage, and also includes some choice quotes from the sponsor of Act 858, Rep. Kevin Anderson (R [of course!]-Rogers), who calls it a “parents’ rights bill”:
The intent was not to make any dramatic conflicts or limitations in folks’ rights or consumer’s rights. The intent was to get it out of the reach of minors. I tried to take a common-sense approach to addressing the problem to make sure parents’ rights are protected without dramatically affecting the right to free speech.
Kevin? Buddy? Word of advice? You want to avoid dramatic conflicts and limitations in folks’ First Amendment rights, you know what? You don’t pass dumbass laws like this. Okay? You have a problem with your kid seeing whatever-it-is you see on comic books that’s harmful to minors? Don’t let your kid go to comic book shops. Don’t want your kid seeing the Dixie Chicks naked on the cover of Entertainment Weekly? Keep your kid away from magazine racks. Uncomfortable with the idea of your kid picking up new ideas from books you haven’t approved? Forbid your own damn kid from going into bookstores and libraries. Leave the rest of us alone, okay? I don’t care how “pure” your intentions are, you don’t pass a sweeping law aimed at censoring reality and the way we look at it and talk about it with each other in support of your own stunted, futile, horribly limited idea of protecting minors and then get to claim you “tried to take a common-sense approach.”
And one more thing? I don’t care how many rules you put into place, how stringently you try to shield your kid’s eyes from the nature of the world as it is—your kid already knows what the word “fuck” means. Your kid’s seen a picture of a naked woman lying back all come-hither on satin sheets, a picture that’s almost falling apart from where it’s been folded six or eight times and stuffed in a wallet. Your kid’s sat at the back of the bus on the way to camp and giggled when the dog-eared copy of Lace got passed to them, the one with the crease in the spine that falls open to that scene with the playboy and the goldfish. Okay? Your kid already knows. You can either admit that, deal with it, give your kid the benefit of your own insight and experience in dealing with this seamy side of pop culture that we will always have with us, you can try to communicate the principles you think your kid will need to make it past this Scylla and Charybdis we all negotiated ourselves back in the day—or you can pop your fingers in your ears and cry “La la la la la la la” and stick your head in the sand until it all goes away and your kid is 18 and magically able to handle this stuff and you don’t have to think about it ever. It’s your choice, what you want to do yourself, with your own kid.
What you can’t do is drag the rest of us into the sand with you. Okay?
Beginning at home.
Max Sawicky manages to make me feel better about the decision I’d already made regarding tomorrow’s MoveOn.org primary. (And Chas—who really ought to post something new to Alas, already—has a good point about the Freepers’ plans to stuff the primary: it’d be much smarter for them to vote Lieberman, for God’s sake.)
So I’ll go on to further legitimize for myself, at least, the efforts of a dotcom bubble hold-over to play hardball with the big boys, by quoting some progressively patriotic platitudes, so I can think I’m Doing Something, and anyway I missed the interview the first time ’round—
My government, my country and the current political international crises are my problems because I’m an adult American. I find that, unwittingly sometimes, I feel more connected to the superstructures of society. We’re born into these systems, but we’re very much outside them when we’re young. It’s like it’s not our society. We have no power. We’re only learning, really, how it works and what our role in it is. I’m writing about big-P politics for the first time, just because it’s more a part of my life now. Suddenly I’m a voting adult and it’s my job to fix it.
After all, she did say every tool is a weapon, if you hold it right.
And you will know me by the peals of laughter.
Past the halfway mark in the new Potter (I’ve also been prepping a kitchen for priming and painting this week and prepping my office to put in a new ceiling, and there was that rented copy of Topkapi we had to watch, so I haven’t been lying around reading all day as I’d otherwise like to have been) (and oh, yeah, I’m not spilling much by way of beans, but if you haven’t yet dug in and want to remain hermetically spoiler-free, you might want to take a pass on this one), and I’ve been amusing myself by pondering: how on earth—given the spectre of leave-no-child-behind teaching-to-the-test education reform haunting the book, the problems caused by officious politicians too small for the task at hand running around doing something because being seen as doing something right now is better than taking the time to think about what it is you really ought to be doing and why, to say nothing of haring off after convenient “bad guys” that can be found and caught and dealt with rather than facing up to more difficult and inconvenient though much more dangerous antagonists, the running thread of Big Content journalism being co-opted as governmental propaganda, and the overarching threat of Voldemort’s ideas as regards wiping clean the wizarding world and drowning its ministries and education system in the bathtub—I’ve been amusing myself, see, in between turning pages with an enjoyable alacrity, by trying to suss out how, exactly, the usual suspects will get around to spinning this as Harry Bush. (George W. Potter, perhaps, for those of a less juvenile bent.)
It hit me, yesterday, as I was working my way through my second cup of coffee. Ladies and gentlemen of the various pundit watches, your assignment, should you choose to accept it: keep a weather-eye out for the first to take us liberal nattering nabobs of negativity, who insist that those pesky WMDs were never there, and this is a problem, and, hem hem, compare us with Dolores Jane Umbridge, Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic and High Inquisitor at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, asking impertinent questions at all the wrong moments and just generally getting in the way of George W. Potter and his plucky Coalition of the Phoenix, keeping them from Doing Whatever It Is That Needs Getting Done.
—Until then, back to Severus and the Order of Phoenix. —I mean, Harry. Yeah. (Snape does not yet seem too terribly incorporeal, Sam. And Julia: you still owe us some theorizing, unless I missed it. Pony up, would you?)
