There once was a sleigh from Nantucket.
A cautionary graphic: here’s what it looks like when a tossed-off link from the Mighty Casio tsunamis through a sleepier backwater of the Islets of Bloggerhans in the late PM of a slow-news Friday:
We are so fucked some more.
Tony Millionaire reports that three of the newspapers that carry his (brilliant) strip Maakies asked him to change the word “cunt” in this week’s edition to “vagina.” They did this, mind you, on the word of their states’ attorneys general, who, in turn, have apparently received a directive from Attorney General John “Tititcaca” Ashcroft. Millionaire explains:
One of the editors told me that it was from the Attorney General’s office in the state in which the paper runs. He said he called and a woman on the phone told him that this was coming down all over from the Federal Attorney General, from Ashcroft’s office. They’re issuing warning letters to state Attorney General’s offices who are cleaning up throughout their individual states. My guess is that these people consider the funny pages a safe haven for kids and that’s why they’ll come down harder on comics than on other print media.
Personally, I think it’s part and parcel of Ashcroft’s general war on icky female stuff: he’s a gynophobe. But, I mean, fuck. Isn’t there, oh, I dunno, a terrorist out there you could go catch or something, instead? Huh? (Still haven’t found that anthrax person, have you.)
A quick addendum:
Yes, we’re not operating on a comfortable level of confirmation here. Millionaire has growled at one person seeking independent confirmation by getting the names of the newspapers in question.
Get the timeline right: it’s not that the Attorney General decided to declare war on this particular Maakies strip. It’s that Millionaire heard from three newspapers that they didn’t want to run a strip with the word “cunt” in it. One of the three made the claims cited above. On the basis of these three complaints, Millionaire then resubmitted the strip. To everyone. If your local alternaweekly ran “vagina,” it doesn’t mean your local alternaweekly is one of the three Bad Papers; they ran what everybody else did.
It is entirely within the realm of possibility that the federal Attorney General has asked states’ attorneys general to aid his office in cracking down on smut in newspaper funny pages; that level of cooperation, symbolic or not, is not uncommon, for all that the states’ attorneys general are not themselves Department of Justice flunkies.
No, the FCC doesn’t have anything to do with newspaper strips. Or online strips (yet). That was a mistake Millionaire made in his first TCJ message board post, and he’s since copped to it.
—I tried to hedge the original post with enough weasel words to cover my own ass (while still leaving it funny enough to, y’know, sting) in the event that this is nothing more than a spectacularly stupid publicity stunt, or a misunderstanding that’s gotten out of hand (given the current climate, though, it’s understandable. If you follow). But since I’ve been linked by Atrios (and can I just say: damn, but the man throws some heavy traffic), I felt I should lay it out a bit more clearly. (Of course, since I was the one who slipped the link over his transom, you could say I ought to have laid it out more clearly from the start. I wouldn’t argue. But hey: it was good enough for Heidi MacDonald and the Pulse!
(No excuse, right, right. Anyway. DEVELOPING, as Drudge would say. —Take that howsomever you like.)
We are so fucked.
During the course of a broadcast of the Golden Globes awards ceremony, Bono said either “This is really, really fucking brilliant” or “This is fucking great.” (The complaints are unclear.)
The FCC ruled, sensibly enough, that this was, basically, okay.
As a threshold matter, the material aired during the “Golden Globe Awards” program does not describe or depict sexual and excretory activities and organs. The word “fucking” may be crude and offensive, but, in the context presented here, did not describe sexual or excretory organs or activities. Rather, the performer used the word “fucking” as an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation. Indeed, in similar circumstances, we have found that offensive language used as an insult rather than as a description of sexual or excretory activity or organs is not within the scope of the Commission’s prohibition of indecent program content.
Then Justin Timberlake ripped Janice Jackson’s bodice in America’s living room, and Howard Stern got uppity about Bush and was promptly fired by Clear Channel, so now the FCC has decided that what Bono said was actually indecent and profane. (Previously, profanity was reserved for challenges to God’s divinity, so I guess a round of sour golf claps for doing something about a grotesque violation of the first amendment, there.) Don’t worry, neither Bono nor any of the broadcasters involved will be fined for this violation, because, as FCC Chairman Michael Powell puts it:
Given that today’s decision clearly departs from past precedent in important ways…
Indeed.
(Atrios has another example of how silly and stupid and politicized this bullshit has gotten. —And what did the Democrats do to protect liberalism and freedom of speech? Fuck-all, that’s what.)
Three simple rules for talking about comics.
First, make like the Lady Montague: never complain, never explain. You’re in this for the hearts and minds, which are impossible to score if you’re always on the defensive. Especially if you’re representing a scrappy little medium that never gets no respect from the major players. Bitching about that lack of respect won’t win you any points; losers bitch, and nobody cares what a loser thinks. And stop with the constantly introducing yourself. Assume you own the room, and you will. Drag queens know this trick, and trust me—people writing seriously about comics are drag queens in the critical apparatus: weird, liminal creatures, floating up out of the demimonde, that knock your socks off in the right light.
So none of this “Comics are a vital, vibrant medium, as capable of adult storytelling as any other” or “Superheroes aren’t merely adolescent power fantasies” crap, okay? It’s just insider baseball for “Bang! Zowie! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!”—and that gag had whiskers when Reagan was president. Don’t sit there clutching at the ground you’ve already got—reach out and take more, and do it with grace and panache and not a little chutzpah. Tell us something we don’t know and make us sit up and take notice or at least make us get the fuck out of the way, and never look back.
Second: suffer no fools gladly—but always be charitable toward your friends and fellow travellers. And I’ll cheerfully allow as how this one’s the hardest: Lord knows I haven’t got it sussed in politics, say. You might boil it down to “Don’t eat your own,” but that’s a little tribal; you might mutter about dirty laundry and how it shouldn’t be washed in public, but that’s not really it, either. Flies and vinegar and honey, maybe? Oh, let’s take as a for instance a cartoonist like Jeff Parker: he’s got chops, he’s paid his dues in the storyboard mines, he’s done a book with adventure and super-powers and reviews that drop old skool names like Alex Toth. He’s an upstanding member of the tribe, is the point, and in the course of a recent interview he says something like this:
ST: What do you love/hate about the comic book industry?
JP: Let me begin with hate. (I love Peter Bagge’s Hate, by the way)
I get this symbolic image of a guy my age or older grabbing up superhero books from a shelf, with a little kid jumping around him trying to grab the books back. It’s an allegory of course, I’ve never seen this actually occur in a store. But there it is: my peers clinging madly to what they loved years ago, but now they’ve matured and want stories that explore relationships and heavier themes. Yet they can’t let go of the cape book, and the superheroes start killing each other and sleeping around, drinking, gambling, talking a whole lot … the kid has wandered off by now in search of something where good guys fight bad guys in a fun way. Back at the store, our adult has squeezed the bunnies to death. The moral? Give the kid his damned books back! Adolescent power fantasies are for powerless adolescents. Read a goddamned crime comic, or a romance book to meet those needs! We’re actually wondering why manga is doing so well now with kids? It’s pretty obvious—they’re writing to a young audience, using imagination and thinking about what would be fun. We can’t take any lessons from that? No, we look at it and think “hmmm the big eyes must be what they find appealing, or maybe these speedlines in the background …”
Give them back their books, and move on. Stop influencing what caped characters do. Stop having opinions on the X-Men. Our nostalgia gets credit for supporting the comics industry but what it really does is kill it. Pant, pant, wheeze ..
I forgot to mention something I love. I’ll come back to that.
And you’ve got two basic ways you can take this: on the one hand, you could say to yourself, you know, that Jeff, he’s one hell of a friend of the art. He’s a fellow-traveller—his love of adventure comics and storytelling and superheroes shines through. And he’s making a good point—there’s a dearth of kid-friendly comics, and avenues for getting those comics into the hands of kids, in the traditional American comics marketplace, or what’s left of it. Perhaps he’s being a bit hyperbolic—it’s more than possible to have a meaningful opinion on the X-Men; of course it is. But he’s mouthing off in an interview. Oh, sure, he could have made this point with greater clarity: “Stop having opinions about whether the X-Men should be wearing spandex again,” he might have said. Hindsight, bygones, l’esprit de l’escalier. His central image is colorful and telling; we can let him have it; we both, after all, have bigger fish to fry. (How does The Interman fit into Henley’s literature of ethics, say?)
Or! You could cry out, “A fool! I shall not suffer him gladly!” And then you could not suffer him with aggrieved asides and snarky commentary and then allow as how it was snarky commentary, really, but here’s why it was important, and before you know it, you’ve not only dissed your friends and fellow travellers, you’ve started complaining and explaining. Lady Montague sighs, and the hearts and minds are off after greener pastures. (Did you really think he was a fool? Did you really get any mileage out of claiming he was? For God’s sake, this isn’t Jonathan Lethem claiming he doesn’t write science fiction. Or Margaret Atwood, rather. Not anywhere near. And when in doubt, assume friend; we need all the friends we can get.) —Better luck next time.
(Why, yes. Of course these rules can be broken. All rules can be broken, if you know how, and when you’re done there’s no one left in a position to give a damn about how you broke the rules. —Yes, you can break that rule, too, of course you can. You know all this already.)
Third is simple enough: never open with a definition. (Or close with one, for that matter. Or stick one in the middle somewhere.) You’re here to describe, not prescribe; the critic’s mantra, to be repeated three times before ever taking up the pen, is “The map is not the thing mapped.” This isn’t rocket science: a genre, like superheroes, or a medium, like comics, has neither necessary nor sufficient conditions that can be limned in a few short, pithy words, to be folded up and tucked into your pocket. If the facts change, you must be prepared to change your mind. (There’s nothing sadder than a critic who can’t be surprised.) —Why, yes: I do know that Scott McCloud opened with a corker of a definition. But his (like everyone’s) is a special case: he was launching an entire critical enterprise, kickstarting a thousand thousand conversations like a mini-Big Bang; his definition (his attempt at a definition) was rather like Gödel going to Schrödinger’s liquor cabinet and opening it up to find out that the cat’s dead and his theory will never be complete, but so what—here’s that single malt he was looking for. Now the party can really get started. But even though he’s since backed sideways off from “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” to, y’know, more of “a temporal map,” still, every young punk with a fast gun thinks they’ve made some telling point with every “yes, but” they can dredge up. (“Are your shoes comics?” I mean, really.) It gets old fast and it distracts from the real business we really ought to be about and frankly, it’s embarassing; best not to encourage them in the first place, and anyway, “Webster’s defines the thing I’m about to blow 800 words on as” is a rhetorical device best left to collegiate editorialists. Y’know?
—Your assignment, then, if you haven’t already, and should you choose to accept one from the likes of me: pick up a copy of Samuel Delany’s Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, so you can read “The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism.” It’s all about comics and writing about comics and genre and art and craft, and he’s much smarter than I am, so pay attention.
Is it safe?
Well, is it? Marilyn Riedel can’t get married to Connie Guardino, through no fault of her own, and yet the government’s refusing to give her the aid it would give any other veteran in her shoes.
Marilyn Riedel, 61, a disabled Army veteran, has trouble moving, drinking and eating. It’s difficult for her to talk because her worsening Parkinson’s disease makes her tongue quiver. But she’s so lucky. She’s lucky because a woman named Connie Guardino, 58, loves her with her whole heart. Whatever the future may offer, this couple will face it together, and they’d like to do it in a cute little two-bedroom home on Illinois Street. If they were married, they could have it. But because they are a same-sex couple, they’ve been rejected for a loan by the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs.
So is it safe? Not quite yet, apparently. Delaware’s banning same-sex marriages and civil unions. They’re going to try to write this exclusion into the state constitution. This is apparently very important business—
I don’t know of anything that disgusts me more than seeing two women get married on television, where one is dressed like a man and has a haircut like a man. I guess they take turns being the man on different nights.
So says Senator Robert L. Venables, a proud Democrat. Will that make it safe, Bob? Maybe not. There’s a county in Tennessee wants charge homosexuals with crimes against nature.
The Rhea County commissioners approved the request 8-0 Tuesday.
Commissioner J.C. Fugate, who introduced the measure, also asked the county attorney to find a way to enact an ordinance banning homosexuals from living in the county.
Will that make it safe? Will it?
Of course not. It will never be safe. It isn’t about keeping marriage safe, and it isn’t about morality, and it isn’t about Christ, and it isn’t about the Bible. The Real Live Preacher already ripped the lid off that pathetic lie—
Show me your scriptures. Show me how you justify condemning homosexual people.
Show me what you got, Christian. The Sodom story? That story is about people who wanted to commit a brutal rape. Let’s all say it together, “God doesn’t like rape.” You could have listened to your heart and learned that, Christian. Move on. What else you got?
A weak-ass little passage from Leviticus? Are you kidding me? Are you prepared to adhere to the whole Levitical code of behavior? No? Then why would you expect others to? What else?
Two little passages—two verses from Romans and one from I Corinthians. There you stand, your justification for a worldwide campaign of hatred is written on two limp pieces of paper. I know these passages, both their greater context and the original language. I could show you why you have nothing, but there is something more important you need to see.
Come with me to the church cellar. Come now and don’t delay. I am shaking with anger and fighting the urge to grab you by the collar and drag you down these steps.
You didn’t know the church had a cellar? Oh yes, every church does. Down, down we go into the darkness. Don’t slip on the flagstone and never mind the heat.
There, do you see the iron furnace door, gaping open? Do you see the roaring flames? Do you see the huge man with glistening muscles, covered with soot? Do you see him feeding the fire as fast as can with his massive, scooped shovel?
He feeds these flames with the bible, with every book, chapter, and verse that American Christians must burn to support our bloated lifestyles, our selfishness, our materialism, our love of power, our neglect of the poor, our support of injustice, our nationalism, and our pride.
See how frantically he works? Time is short, and he has much to burn. The prophets, the Shema, whole sections of Matthew, most of Luke, the entire book of James. Your blessed 10 commandments? Why would you want to post them on courtroom walls when you’ve burned them in your own cellar?
Do you see? DO YOU SEE? Do you see how we rip, tear, and burn scripture to justify our lives?
The heat from this cursed furnace rises up and warms the complacent worshippers in the pews above. The soot from the fire blackens our stained glass so that we may not see out and no one wants to see in.
Do you smell the reek of this injustice? It is a stink in the nostrils of the very living God. We are dressed in beautiful clothes and we wear pretty smiles, but we stink of this blasphemous holocaust.
Every church in America has a cellar like this. We must shovel 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, because every chapter and book we ignore must be burned to warm our comfy pews.
And you come to me with two little scraps of scripture to justify your persecution of God’s children?
Sit down Christian. Sit down and be you silent.
What use is marriage, if I have to treat so many people like so much shit to keep it safe? People I know and love? Why would I want any part of it? Why would you?
(We’re still marrying same-sex couples in Multnomah County. Benton County joins us in a few days. Massachusetts will be here soon enough, out here in the wider world, out here in the twenty-first century. And look! The world keeps keeping on. —Marriage is as safe as ever it was.)
Cocks crowing; dogs barking.
Five days after 9/11, I got my birthday presents. They Might Be Giants were supposed to play the Crystal Ballroom that night, so there was something of a theme: Mink Car and McSweeney’s no. 6, the one they did the soundtrack for. That McSweeney’s came as a long, low, hardbound book, and the front cover is stamped with the following:
WE NOW
KNOW WHO
I still get shivers.
So I open it up to Breyten Breytenbach’s essay, “Notes from the Middle World,” which, he says, “is, and is not, the same as the Global Village.
Let’s say that those of the Middle World—I think of them as uncitizens, the way you have un-American activities as opposed to non- or anti-American—are global village vagrants, knights of the naked star. They are defined by what they are not, or no longer, and not so much by what they oppose or even reject. They ventured into zones where truths no longer fit snugly and where certainties do not overlap, and most likely they get lost there.
Which was rather shockingly rendered obsolete five days before I first cracked the cover. (Except it wasn’t: nothing was changed that day, not anything like that, because the terrorists didn’t win after all, not yet, and the Middle World is still very much where we left it; what else is Eastern Standard Tribe about, if not life in the Middle World?) —Breytenbach quotes a letter from the poet Ka’afit:
The word “peace.” Ah, how voluptuous. Like “democracy.” It just fills the mouth with its familiar, well-sucked, inoffensive, satisfying taste. As if one were experiencing one’s goodness. No indigestion. No burnt lips. It won’t cause constipation and you won’t grow fat on it either. In fact, it carries no nutritional connotation whatsoever. And guaranteed to have no secondary effects: it won’t provoke a rash of freedom, let alone the aches of justice. Ah, “peace,” “democracy,” soft drugs of self-absorption—how we love to talk sweet nothings with them tucked in the cheek hard by the tongue, chew them, take them out at international conferences to lick the contours before plopping them back in the mouth…
And then I close the book, because that’s about all I’d want to say to anyone who seems to think it’s somehow unseemly to have an election as scheduled after a terrorist attack. —They’re sucking on different words, but the effect’s much the same.
Always remember that genre lies; that a division is made to keep apart that which would naturally flow together; that something there is that does not love a wall. (“Art in life is not life,” Ad Reinhardt is kind enough to remind us, at the end of that McSweeney’s. “Life in art is not life. People in art are not people. Dogs in art are dogs.”) The 60-year-old and the 16-year-old are the same person, really, for all that they’re at each other’s throats. I’ve put aside Breytenbach’s cosmopolitan utopia so I can read you some Dennis McBride—this is a poem called “The Future of Rome,” and I keep it clipped up on the commonplace board above my desk:
Let’s say having increases hunger,
that light makes it harder to really see.
Then suppose, like me, you don’t have eyes,
suppose you don’t have ears to hear
and there is no nose.
Imagine, like me,
you don’t even have a mouth
to put the sweet soft black berry in.
But suppose there are Red and Green and Yellow,
that you feel them.
Then suppose you had a lamp
bigger than you are to lean against,
a dark maroon red carpet to sit on
and a blue teacup large as your chest.
Then imagine, like me
you were made of gold,
that you were willing to be idle
and were the one to come after Man.
Think of having only to sit,
of the heart’s thoughts,
of fear leading finally to safety,
speech to silence.
Think of enough.
And so I do, I close my eyes and suppose for a minute, and then, well, that’s enough, right? And so I get up and head back out into—what?
I don’t know. It’s after midnight. I’m putting off other work.
But I’ll let you know as soon as I figure it out.
How to destroy P2P.
Let’s say when you were younger than you are now that you went to your girlfriend’s senior-year prom and when she was occupied elsewhere (this would be after the thing with the fountain outside, so maybe she’s in the bathroom with her best friend, laughing as she peels off her damp stockings), you screw your courage to the sticking point and sidle up to the band between songs and say hey, you know, could you maybe play, you know, that song? The one by that band, Modern English? “I’ll Stop the World and Melt With You”? You know? And he laughs and says sure, in a couple of songs. And in a couple of songs they do and the way her face lights up when they do and you grin and hold out your hand is something to see.
Even if there’s a dozen other people at least lighting up all across the dance floor for the very same reason.
So you go online years later because, you remember that TV commercial Michael Palin did for that decent radio station in Chicago? Where he’s holding the pizza the whole time, going on about how on W-whatever, we don’t play songs over and over and over again until they lose all meaning and become a mockery of themselves like every other radio station in town, and then he looks down at the pizza and looks mournfully up at the camera and says, to think this was once “Stairway to Heaven”? I mean, yeah, “I’ll Melt With You” is total pizza, but her face lit up. You know? And when you were in high school everybody bought that Modern English album for that song but they all bought it on cassette and who has cassettes nowadays? And who can find the 4AD retrospective in their local record shop? So you go online and you fire up your favorite P2P filesharing software and you plug in Modern English and sure enough, presto! There’s a whole slew of copies of “I’ll Melt With You.”
Only just about every single one of them is that ghastly early ’90s remake they did as “the 80s Modern English” or some such shit after that goddamn Burger King commercial.
(Then again, Gilmore Girls used the La’s original version of “There She Goes” on its soundtrack or something, apparently, so hey, the filesharing thing wasn’t a total loss.)
Chestnut.
Between Sebbo’s digression into the Bloggerhans triumphalism that really isn’t the point of my homeschooling post below at all, and this genteel dustup over in Johnathon Delacour’s always-excellent journal, I’ve found myself falling backwards into thoughts of generalizations, and why we do them, and when, and how, and when they’re well done, and when they aren’t, and how, and why, little stuff, you know, so instead I’m going to talk about this quote, and this bit from the Tao Te Ching, which maybe have something to do with generalizations, what doesn’t, after all, but really they more sort of back into some really big stuff that kept trying to squeeze its way into the aforementioned homeschooling post no matter how many times I tried to wave ’em off, since, you know, really fuckin’ long, and if after reading this the connection isn’t so clear to you, keep in mind it’s only rather moreso to me; my muse, it sems, is a magpie. (Ooh! Shiny!)
The quote:
Anyone who is not a liberal at 16 has no heart; anyone who is not a conservative at 60 has no head.
Which has been said in a lot of different ways by a lot of different people at a lot of different times, so let’s take it, glib though it is, as if there were hidden inside a kernel of truth. —Because I’m starting to think there is, and not of the liberal-who-gets-mugged or the liberal-who-pays-property-tax-for-the-first-time variety. (After all, what of the conservative who gets arrested? —But are they really becoming liberal? Or have they merely found something new to conserve?) Let’s take as our text “Freedom,” the 80th chapter from Ursula Le Guin’s rendition of the Tao (she doesn’t call it a translation, and we might as well respect that):
Let there be a little country without many people.
Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred,
and never use them.
Let them be mindful of death
and disinclined to long journeys.
They’d have ships and carriages,
but no place to go.
They’d have armor and weapons,
but no parades.
Instead of writing,
they might go back to using knotted cords.
They’d enjoy eating,
take pleasure in clothes,
be happy with their houses,
devoted to their customs.
The next little country might be so close
the people could hear cocks crowing
and dogs barking there,
but they’d grow old and die
without ever having been there.
And the 60-year-old says after a thoughtful pause, yes, I can see: this would be the best of all possible worlds; this is the solution at the other end of the moral calculus; this is the good life for the greatest number of people, with a minimum of pain and suffering. Utopia. Nirvana. On a clear day, you can just barely see it from here.
The 16-year-old? The 16-year-old blinks and shrugs and says, yeah, sure, but what the fuck do you do on a Saturday night?
Another data point in the wall.
Jim Henley, after touching on the issue of homeschooling in a shouts-and-murmurs entry, points us to this year-old column by Eve Tushnet, which spins a sort of anti-CW vortex about the whole phenomenon: Blam! Kapow! Homeschooling isn’t just for religious isolationist freaks anymore! —I’m being unfair. Her basic point—that homeschooling has the potential of involving kids far more and more healthily in the real world than the highly artificial madding crowds of American public schools—is sound; it’s muffled, though, by gauzy layers of op-ed hyperbole and impersonal generalization. Not her fault; it’s a limitation of the punditsprech form, one that palls rapidly once you’re accustomed to a varied diet of blogging, with its cranky, loopy unpredictability and its raw personal viewpoint, and this isn’t supposed to be an “Advantage: blogosphere!” piece, so I’ll cut that out right now.
I was homeschooled for a few years.
It started in Kentucky, where the local elementary school was small enough that there were two grades per classroom: while the sixth grade was having its English class, say, the fifth grade was free to do their homework, or read, or draw the really cool van they’d buy when they were an adult and a defense lawyer traveling from city to city saving desperate, innocent folks from wrongful accusations (it pulled a Dodge Charger on a trailer—the van was great for sleeping in, and office space, but you needed something with more get-up-and-go for the inevitable car chases), or scribbling a revolutionary sci fi magnum opus in a loose-leaf notebook (pseudonym of choice: Christopher Kyndyll. Don’t ask), or whatever, so long as you were quiet and not disruptive. —My mother, noticing my sister and I didn’t seem to bring any homework, you know, home, and maybe concerned we weren’t getting as much out of our day as we could be, picked up on something—I’m betting it was an ad in the Mother Earth News—and decided to give the Calvert School a try.
(Mom: feel free to pitch in. I wasn’t taking notes at the time—I started out with Art History [this is a Doric capital, and this an Ionic; I, of course, liked Corinthians best; and I just now remembered what entasis means], but was that all I took, that first year?)
—A brief digression, to frame the anecdote: we were living on a 70-acre farm on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. The nearest town was Ammons Bottom: a Baptist church and a post office with a gas pump out front and if my memory’s insisting on sticking one of those waist-high coolers full of old Coke in green glass bottles by the screen door, well, it might not be far wrong. The aforementioned school had a rule: if your driveway was more than a mile long, the bus had to drive down it and pick you up outside your house. Ours was three-quarters of a mile. We walked. There were hills. It snowed. —We leased most of the land to a couple of local farmers who planted corn and soy and tobacco, and we had an acre and a half of organic, pesticide-free garden, which I got mighty tired of hoeing. I used to duck chores by hiding in the tobacco barn: when the leaves are harvested, they’re hung on a grid of rafters in a big empty barn to dry. You could climb a good two storeys off the ground and be completely hidden between giant, fleshy leaves that smelled like really good, damp cigars; I read a lot of Ian Fleming up there, which seems only appropriate. We got a lot of our staples shipped to us from Walnut Acres, and between their old skool packaging and Calvert’s retro-Edwardian design sensibilities, I’ve got a Pavlovian thing for muted colors and clean, simple, strong typography: integrity, it says to me; purity. Authority. Whatever it is, it’s going to be good for me.
(Oh, and lest you get the wrong idea: Ford, Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush—insofar as I can tell.)
In 1983, we upped and left Kentucky for the Carolinas. We first stopped in a thereless suburb of Charlotte (Quail Hollow, was it?), camping out in a cheap little rental while the folks went house-hunting. This was my first introduction to a really big school, where you went to a different room for each class: seventh grade. I wasn’t there long enough to be especially traumatized by any particular peer, but my revolutionary sci fi magnum opus—up to 300 loose-leaf pages at that point, grubby with old graphite—was stolen from its three-ring binder. The crime puzzles me to this day: weirdly particular, and yet no one knew me, and I didn’t know anyone; I was just this quiet kid who was there for, what, six weeks? Eight weeks? (All I remember learning for sure at this school were the names of the five Pythagorean solids and how to cheat a Rubik’s cube by popping a corner loose, taking it apart, and snapping it all back together again. Well, that, and the kid I sometimes hung out with from across the cul de sac, who ended up giving me his D&D books because his mother had decided they were tools of the devil or something, and didn’t that turn out well.) —When I discovered the crime, I did what anyone would do: I went immediately to the authorities to report it. I didn’t even make it past the receptionist in the administration office. Some kid’s notes had been stolen. Weren’t even anything to do with a class. Big whup. Next! (And if I have some sympathy for the other side, now—how big was that school? how many kids? how impossible to track down this particular needle? And if I can look back and realize now that it was nothing more than a kid’s pastiche of Brian Daley’s Han Solo books? It does me little good, standing in front of that desk, trying to get somebody, anybody to listen to what had just been done to me.)
I doubt the theft of my magnum opus had much to do with the decision to pull us out of the school system entirely, once we finally settled over the state line in Rock Hill, South Carolina; I think it had a lot more to do with the fact that the public schools in Rock Hill, South Carolina sucked. I’m not sure how much of a pioneer we were. There was some (testy) negotiation. A newspaper article or two was written, and a photographer dispatched. Local political races were scrutinized for the slightest hint of where they stood on homeschooling. It all worked out, in the end: we had to maintain an accredited curriculum (again, Calvert), and at least show up to take whatever standardized tests the state mandated for whatever grade we were in whenever they were scheduled. (I seem to recall we also had to have a formal name, to cross some t or dot some i; and so we were the Cherry Hill Academy. Mom had letterhead printed.) —We were off.
What was a day of homeschooling like?
Mostly, I sat in my room and read. Bliss.
Calvert’s curriculum, at the middle school level, was pretty much self-directed: you followed the guidelines, did the reading, and when you were ready you took a pretty thorough exam which was sent off to Baltimore, graded, and sent back. English, geography, math, history—Cathy, if you’re reading this, chime in with what you were up to; heck, Tim: I have only the vaguest of notions of what second or third grade were like. —It wasn’t entirely me up in my room: I had a Latin tutor, two or three times a week, and the folks picked up a huge chalkboard for five bucks at a college auction: it was set up in the back den, and I’d conjugate on it, or Dad would show us the dangers of dividing by zero by proving that 1 equaled 2. He brought home a TRS-80 Model III, and I learned BASIC so I could figure out how to mess around with computer games and I learned Scripsit so I wouldn’t have to scribble my various revolutionary sci fi opera in vulnerable notebooks anymore. I made soap as a combination craft and science project. Calvert didn’t have much of a high school program then, so I jumped to a new correspondence school (whose name escapes me) for my freshman year (though I kept with Calvert’s Latin course); one of my projects was to thoroughly research the town’s water-treatment system. Mom set up the appointments and we made family field trips of checking out pumping stations and filtering ponds.
But mostly, it was me, up in my room, reading.
We weren’t isolated, though. There was youth group at the church and handbell choir, and Cathy and I were on the YMCA swim team. There was summer camp—church-based trips to Washington, DC; YMCA camp at King’s Mountain. There were the neighborhood kids. We weren’t sitting with them at desks lined up neatly in small rooms for hours at a stretch, but that was fine by me: we had as much of a social life as I wanted, pretty much. I was a quiet kid. I stayed up in my head a lot. I liked sitting around reading, mostly.
Which, you’ll note, is mostly what I was doing.
—But that was a large part of what eventually became the problem, I think. The only regular benchmarks I had were those tests, which I took whenever I was ready; it was all too easy not to be ready, just yet. It didn’t help that the one class in which I did have regular contact with someone else was Latin, with my tutor, was the one I was not doing very well in. For just about the first time ever, I wasn’t skating to an easy A. Heck, I was having a hard time making the B. Sometimes, the C. For someone who’d matriculated at a number of Gifted ’n’ Talented programs, this was decidedly Not Good. My tutor sighed (gently, but he sighed); the red ink puddled; the malaise spread. It got easier to say, and not just about Latin: I’m not ready yet. I need to do some more reading. Go over it again. In a week. Maybe another week. (And of course what I was doing was reading other stuff, instead: John Varley; Julian May; Piers Anthony; Robert Heinlein; Blakely St. James; Ursula Le Guin; Orbit—anything but hic, hæc, hoc, huius huius huius. —Why would I need to hide my cheap genre trash behind a propped-up copy of Nations of the World? I had the whole room to myself! —Okay, every now and then Mom would check up on me. But otherwise.)
Anyway, what with all the me sitting up in my room reading, it took three calendar years to get through eighth and ninth grades. There was disappointment (more sighing); vituperations were imparted; the malaise spread further; my heels dragged ever deeper. My sister was having similar difficulties (though I do not wish to speak specifically to them—vide supra re: being in my room reading all the time; not taking notes—so maybe we should edit that to “my sister was similarly having difficulties”)—after another round of protracted negotiation, it was agreed that we would re-enter public school. The Cherry Hill Academy was closed.
Now, what we were negotiating was that me and Cathy wanted to go back to public school. Sitting up in my room reading all day was wonderful; fucking up course work and disappointing my parents wasn’t. I didn’t know whether I’d be happier in the day-to-day grind of Northwest High School, but I knew it was a system I could do well in. And doing well, or the appurtenances of having done well, were what was important. —Funnily enough, one of the arguments Cathy and I made was the one about social deprivation: we’re cut off from our peers, we said. We need to be shut up in small rooms with twenty or thirty of them every day. (Perhaps we didn’t phrase it quite like that.) I doubt that argument turned the tide—it was bullshit, pure and simple; we went to youth group, after all, and the YMCA swim team, and a lot of the kids we saw in these social circumstances would be shut up in those small rooms with us. So much so that my reputation as a quiet bookish weirdo preceded me: I was picked last for tennis and bowling in gym and picked on for whatever book I was reading at lunch and, well. But how was the education, in this school system that so notoriously sucked? I couldn’t take Latin—it wasn’t on the curriculum—and I couldn’t research the town’s water treatment facilities in-depth (instead of one frowning, serious sixteen-year-old asking you questions about charcoal filtration, imagine 30-some-odd vying for your attention). But I could go on a field trip to Bull Island; I could make a series of bizarre short videos with classmates based on some e.e. cummings poems; I could learn the time-honored techniques for making it out of American Lit without ever cracking the cover of Ethan Frome. And I was making As again. So.
That said.
Looking back, I didn’t do too well with the homeschooling thing, did I. —But did it do well by me? What would have happened had we not tried it? Well, I’d be different, but better? Worse? We’re talking a counterfactual here, so any variant outcome is as true as any other: my spirit might well have been ground into gloomy alienation by the massed cruelty of my peers, a fate that months of reading by myself spared me; knuckling under and working to meet the regular goals imposed by an inflexible system might have helped me develop my focus and persistence, two qualities I still have trouble with today. (What?) Heck, there’s nothing to say that both those outcomes wouldn’t have been the case, and more besides! Better? Worse? —Different. But it’s the road not taken, and the snow’s both dark and deep; all the little horses are starting to think it’s queer. Let’s see if we can wrap this up.
Blam! Kapow! Homeschooling isn’t just for religious isolationist freaks anymore!
Then, it never really was. Nor is it necessarily isolating or insulating in and of itself. Homeschooled kids have plenty of other options for a kid-based social life, and any family that turns to homeschooling as a means to keep their kids safe from the world will a) have lots of other techniques for blocking the quotidian and b) inevitably end up disappointed. I don’t worry so much about home school in this regard; I worry about tiny little towns in the middle of nowhere and thereless cul de sacced subdivisions and nothing but strip malls and frontage roads.
Homeschooling is hard!
And not just for me, suddenly bereft of all structure and left floating with my own inadequate devices. Dad worked, Mom stayed at home—with four kids, three of them school-aged. Even with an externally supplied, accredited curriculum, even with outsourced grading, even with a Latin tutor, we were a full-time job and then some. And without casting any aspersions whatsoever, there’s something to be said for making as clean a break as possible between familial expectations and scholastic expectations: the complications of the one can interfere with attempts at the other. Parents teach, and teachers act in loco parentis, but the role of teacher is very different from the role of parent, much as child differs from student. Which is not to say this is an insurmountable problem; just that it’s one more brick on the load.
Homeschooling is a viable option!
Of course it is, and more attractive now than ever, what with zero tolerance and all. Of all the responsibilities that a kid entails, figuring out the hows and whys of securing a school that won’t be an utter hellhole is the one that quails me the most. Why not chuck it all? Why not hand your kid a desk and a library card and tell her not to come down till dinner? It would have to be an improvement over officious vice-principals and obsolete teachers and cruel pranks and stultifying monkey-work. Right? —Seriously: Tushnet’s exemplar (taking chemistry and calculus classes at a local private high school, receiving instruction in English and history from his mother, participating in an all-homeschooler French class taught by a neighborhood father, having a tutor for oboe lessons, playing on a public school sports team) is an ideal, but it’s an attractive ideal. There’s something at once communitarian and DIY punk about it all. And it would have to be better than cruelly stultifying, officiously obsolete pricks. Right? It would take money, and a firmly stay-at-home parent, but it would be worth it. Right?
And yet.
It’s too easy to blame public education. It’s a shattered, crippled, dangerous wreck; it’s also one of the best ideas we ever came up with. Education is vital; opening it up as much as possible, making those opportunities available to every kid you can reach, is not only the morally right thing to do, it’s the best way possible to make sure you as a society can best capitalize on the potential of each of your members. Anything that fragments that ideal risks punishing kids for the ineptitude and bad choices of their parents (or guardians). No, we can’t protect everyone from everything bad, and no, we shouldn’t have schools where careless parents can drop their kids off and pick them up, well-rounded and ready for college, after 12 years. But we haven’t done right by our best idea in decades. It’s shattered and crippled and dangerous, but for every officious prick waving the zero-tolerance handbook around, there’s still a half-dozen smart administrators making the best of a very delicate juggling act; you never hear about them because they do their jobs well. For every obsolete teacher, there’s a dozen doing good, solid, thankless work, and a couple that are brilliant, in spite of every reason in the world not to be. For each piece of stultifying monkey-work, there’s also, here and there, inspiration and serendipity and joy that you couldn’t find anywhere else. The ideal of the American public school is one worth fighting for. Not giving up on. And homeschooling feels all too much like giving up.
(But: teaching to the test and No Child Left Behind and teachers buying their own paper because the school budget can’t afford the copies they need to make and for God’s sake the religious isolationist freaks are taking over the school boards and demolishing text books left and right! When is enough enough? When do you leave the sinking hulk and try to launch a brand new ship? Would I homeschool my own kid, in spite of all the hardship and shortcomings? Would I sacrifice them at the altar of a broken idea? Would I take it as it came, trusting in the basic resilience of kids and the power of reading to them every night from infancy to muddle us through, much as we’ve all managed to muddle through, one way or another, more or less? —Ask me when the time comes.)
Noted without comment.
BEGALA: Greg, one of the ads concludes with President Bush praising freedom, faith, families and sacrifice. What sacrifice has our president asked of the rich?
MUELLER: I think everybody’s making money right now. We’ve got a Hispanic middle class, The New York Times reported about last year. George Bush created a Hispanic middle class.
—Republican strategist Greg Mueller on Crossfire, via South Knox Bubba
South Park Agonistes.
“Conservative Punk Rockers?” I said, befuddled. “Well shit, Toby. It must really just be all about the clothes and the belts at this point, huh. I mean, if some kid can listen to a top ten pop song that sounds just like the other 9 top ten pop songs, support the regime occupying the white house, comb his gentleman’s Mohawk down into a respectable hairdo when it’s time for school and still call himself a punk, then it really has nothing at all to do with the ideas and ideals that got me into this whole thing when I was a kid. You know what Toby. Let’s give those fucking Simple Plan listening, Paul Wolfowitz supporting, spiky belt wearing conservative kids the word ‘punk’. It’s pretty useless at this point anyway, and I think that we could come up with a much better and less saleable word for a community based around songs inspired by anger and frustration and played by untalented musicians. Don’t you think, Toby?”
—Brendan Kelly, of the Lawrence Arms
Indeed. But:
Hippie was ten years old when punk was born—and that was 25 years ago! At least hippies don’t identify themselves as hippies—let alone whine about weekend hippies—anymore. I think you can safely call punk the far more conservative pattern of subcultural self-identification through the purchase, display and consumption of the proper commodities.
It’s kinda nice, how those two quotes talk to each other. Then you have to go and follow the links and realize that yes, Virginia, there is a conservative punk movement, and no, Virginia, it’s not bleeding-edge satire.
I was never punk. (Everybody who knows me done giggling up their sleeves? Thank you.) I was never punk; in high school I ended up with the Eclectics, who straddled the divide between art geeks and drama geeks. We didn’t dress any funnier than your average high school student in the late ’80s—okay, there was the fad for hospital pants, and I was famous for my Clint Eastwood serape, and Cith had a thing for porkpie hats. We listened to a lot of Prince and Joe Jackson and Robyn Hitchcock, and I still remember the day I stood in whatever it was we had before Sam Goody’s, staring at the wall display of Lifes Rich Pageant and The Queen is Dead, wondering which to buy (and now I wonder what might have happened if I’d bought the other); X and the Dead Kennedys and the Butthole Surfers and the Sex Pistols and the Violent Femmes didn’t come to me till later, and even so, you can tell: I wasn’t punk. We danced badly on purpose at homecoming and put out one issue of a pseudonymous student paper and worshipped spoons and swore we’d never forget each other. (Of course it all goes back to high school! For God’s sake, when we die we’re going to wake up in heaven and it’s going to be the fucking Westerburg cafeteria.)
I was never punk, but I can tell you this with great authority and a straight face: Stavros is punk. The chumps linked above? Not.
For all the good that does. —Now that I’ve drawn my silly little line in the sand, let’s admit it: DIY is profoundly attractive to the sort of libertarian who walks what so many people would rather talk, and there’s a certain conservative thrill to standing athwart the nasty brutishness of the world and yelling right back at it, and this day and age, if you’re on campus and silly enough to be duped by Horowitz’s moonshine, you might actually think you’re speaking truth to power. (One could also think of the characters in Repo Man as role models, to be perfectly snarky.) There’s no doubt that punk can vote Bush, or fight to repeal the estate tax, or post laudatory galleries of our soldiers at work in Iraq. But there’s a definite divorce of sign and signified here, one that rings some heavy-duty cognitive dissonance on anyone who went to high school back in the day. The plaid pants and the T-shirt panels safety-pinned to the backs of leather jackets, those deliberately ugly haircuts and the fuck-off sneers, the music (because it was always about the music, wasn’t it?)—it didn’t mean much, at least not coherently, but it did mean something, and it meant whatever it was that it meant with great fervor, and now it means—what? Let’s eat sushi, and pay a fair market price?
For fuck’s sake, remember when drawing Reagan with green hair was a sign of disrespect?
(Satire? ’Fraid not. But I still haven’t ruled out astroturf, myself.)
This is what marriage looks like.
So I learn from the ineluctable Kevin that Larry Lewis, ad salesman extraordinaire for Just Out (and the tireless engine of commerce that drove Anodyne to its giddy heights), married Cshea Walker. They’ve been together for over eleven years. Congratulations, guys; it’s about time you made honest men of each other. —Here’s the photos.
Juping the Man.
There’s a lot to love in this traveller’s sketch of script-kiddie culture: insight into the hows and whys, ruefully funny anecdotes, a new word (juped), and the general cultural vertigo of peering over the edge of something you knew was there but never really looked at and finding its as complex as just about everything else. —Plus, paranoiac fretting! (Not that there isn’t one hell of a lot to be paranoid about, here:
Roblimo: How wise do you think law enforcement is to any of this?
Andy: The general answer I’ve gotten is, “We don’t have the time or resources to have our agents monitor IRC.” They know, but they’ve adamantly got their fingers in their ears whistling loudly.
Roblimo: And yet, you’re telling me attacks on DoD and other critical networks are often coordinated on IRC.
Andy: Of course, Department of Homeland Security is barely off the ground. They’re starting to come around. Al Qaida, or whoever, with enough money could buy these kids, have them phonephreak 911 facilities, packet government mail and web servers, attack Department of Energy facilities and local and state government for large cities and states. Even if nothing really serious happened the effect on our economy, since the FBI and DHS’s answer has to be “Well, umm, we’ve been ignoring this entirely actually,” wouldn’t be fun to watch.
(Sleep tight, y’all.)
Sweet luvvin’ update.
Steve Lieber has unearthed a whole passel of people who intend to get busy with all manner of things once the bedrock of marriage is destroyed by those icky, icky gays. To quote the ink-stain’d wretch: “Remember, an elected official has made it clear that if you can marry someone with the same bathroom parts, you can marry anything.” So! Get with it, people! You’d better start snapping up your future spouses now, or when that blessed day arrives, you’ll be left out in the cold!
Our gay weddings, cont’d.
Betsy, whose whim is law, leads us off into more good discussion of the hows and whys of the county’s decision to issue marriage certificates to same-sex couples, and all I have time for this morning is to fling you a couple of links and hope for the best: be sure to check out this post at Jack Bog’s Blog, which features a comments-thread debate between the proprietor and Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard. —The most interesting bit of news we learned this morning (via the One True b!X): Oregon Public Broadcasting reported on 25 February that the county was to consider the issue of same-sex marriage; the (rest of the) media and various opponents to the action look even more silly, now, claiming to have been blindsided by the Multnomah Four.
(Note to self: beef up the local links in the linchinography yonder.)
update— Thank you, Allen Brill! The good reverend has posted a link I’d seen and lost, to this post by Chuck Currie proving such Oregonian headlines as “Pastors unite in opposition” to be a load of shameless bullshit. (Don’t miss Brill’s other posts highlighting Christians, progressive and conservative, who are speaking out against the bigotry of the Federal Marriage Amendment and its various state-level clones and doppelgängers.)
Not quite cricket.
Jeff, the atrocity note-taker, raises a good point over on his other blog, and does so with more panache than the Oregonian’s editorial board: we probably ought to talk about how it is, exactly, that the commissioners of Multnomah County decided to start issuing marriage certificates to same-sex couples.
Here’s the nutshell: Oregon’s open meeting law requires that if a quorum of commissioners meet to discuss a matter of public policy, they have to announce that fact to the public, so they might attend if they so choose. Diane Linn, Lisa Naito, Serena Cruz and Maria Rojo de Steffey all deliberately met two-by-two to discuss obtaining a legal opinion on , to avoid the quorum and the subsequent attention of the public. —They also avoided mentioning anything to the fifth council member, Lonnie Roberts, who is not so coincidentally opposed to gay marriage.
Oops.
So, yes: this is sneaky. It isn’t cricket. The letter of the law was followed, sure, but the spirit of the law got mugged, in broad daylight. Frowny faces and tsk-tsks all around. The Oregonian is not without its point, and the hinterlands have thrown up the sorts of bloody shirts that make me worried about backlash. (Sure, Lars Larson has [reportedly] been reduced to a hoarsely incoherent roar of drive-time apoplexy, but failing to secure the future of equal rights and our state’s [recent] reputation as a [relative] repudiator of bigotry is too high a price to pay for such admittedly juvenile pleasures.)
That said, there’s a broader context to keep in mind, here.
First, let’s be real: if the matter were solely up to the residents of the People’s Republic of Multnomah County, then there’d already be gay and lesbian couples celebrating their silver anniversaries. (Okay. Maybe tin.) The spirit of the law has been roughed up, but none of the Multnomah Four need to worry that they haven’t represented the will of the people who elected them.
But it isn’t (just) up to us, of course. The county can no more compel the state or federal government to recognize the weddings performed than it can, oh, turn back the tide, or convince people that the thing with the Klingon interpreter was a humorous example of something within the realm of possibility rather than someone’s serious idea of an actual need to be met right here and now. And while I’d certainly like to think Oregon is bigger than the bigotry exhorted by some clergyfolk who really ought to know better, it’s still pretty clear that a constitutional amendment welcoming homosexuals into fully legal wedded bliss—or anything more than a vague arms-length I-don’t-wanna-hear-about-it quasi-tolerance—has no chance of flying in the here and now, if it were put to a state-wide vote.
This is a point in favor of the council’s actions, though. Much like the same-sex weddings performed in San Francisco and New Paltz and Sandoval County (and Seattle? and Chicago? and?), the same-sex weddings performed in Multnomah County face a myriad of state and national hurdles: everyone from their employers to their insurance companies to the Social Security Administration is playing wait-and-see, and everyone from the cubicle-bound bureaucrats to the teary-eyed joy-struck newlyweds knows these weddings can be dissolved with the stroke of a judge’s pen. (The county commissioners certainly know it.)
And the pundits ought to know it, and so should the Oregonian; they just get frothing mileage out of pretending otherwise: the county commissioners are ushering in an era of gay weddings without any open, public debate! —Yet gays and lesbians have been marrying each other for decades, in a wide variety of churches, all over the country. And Multnomah County already has a domestic partnership registry; gay and lesbian couples can share health insurance and adopt children. Heck, the fee is the same sixty bucks for either the registry or a marriage certificate! The step of erasing the final separation from equality is hardly so big as it might first appear—once you look past the name of the activity in question. (And what’s in a name?)
So: far from suddenly overturning the rule of law, and the definition of marriage as we’ve known it for millennia (polygamy, dowries, insistence on virginity, and that bit with the brother-in-law notwithstanding), the county has actually made a (relatively) minor change to rights already granted (and, yes, a relatively major symbolic gesture) that is still entirely contingent upon the interpretation of the state’s attorney general and the courts and the state legislature and the voters. It’s an attempt to force a challenge precisely where that challenge should be made, and a challenge (again) supported by a comfortable majority of the county in question. The dialogue continues; the rule of law obtains; the system’s working just fine.
That it was planned in secret, though? Hidden from their not-so-supportive fifth? In violation of the spirit of the open meetings law? (This was the point in question, remember.) Well, as with any act of civil disobedience, your take in part depends on how you feel about the ends toward which these means have been applied. The immediate ends here are not the legal and secure marriages of same-sex couples: those aren’t on the table yet, and haven’t been, in San Francisco or New Paltz or Sandoval County. (New York City? LA? Vermont?) We’re engaged in political theatre, here: the secret meetings weren’t the means toward the end of legal same-sex marriages; the open celebration of same-sex marriages are the means toward the end of civil rights. And it’s brilliantly savvy theatre, at that—every marriage solemnized in this blazing spotlight (as opposed, again, to the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, that have been solemnizes 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.)
So: an act of civil disobedience (the violation of the spirit of the open meeting law I’m talking about here, not the resulting change in county policy) to make possible a challenge that joins the gathering momentum of challenges from more and more cities and counties across the country, forcing the problem to be confronted in all-too human terms. —All due apologies to Lonnie Roberts, the commissioner left out in the cold, but I can live with that.
(After all, where’s the harm here? What’s been taken away from anyone, anyone at all? Tell me, please! The county’s making money, wedding planners are scooping up new business by the truckload, and the city and county are cementing just the sort of reputation that looks good to the sorts of creative enterprises we need to keep moving up those Best Cities lists. Look into the faces of the people waiting on line for their marriage certificates and show me the damage done by this intemperate, carefully planned action. Where’s the harm?
(And if you still feel this is a dangerous precedent to set, nonetheless, in spite of it all, the greater good notwithstanding, slippery sloping road to hell and all that, well, there’s the usual consequences anyone engaged in civil disobedience must face: in this case, the loss of good will, opprobrium from the court of public opinion, and, of course, the ballot box. —Somehow, I don’t think the four commissioners are all that worried.)
Those Bush ads.
Thanks to the Spouse, I’ve seen a still from the Bush ads crassly capitalizing on the pain and horror of 9/11. —Frankly, I think they could’ve been a wee bit more tasteful.
