arod in san francisco

Wet

2009-07-12T21:04:00.000-07:00

Every morning, after the dog walk but before I put on my tie, I grab a handful of koi pellets, go to the pond in the back yard, and thrust my arm almost to my elbow into the cold water. I let the pellets slowly float free to the surface from between my fingers, but keep enough in my down-turned palm that one or another of the koi find it worth their while to nibble directly from my hand.

Th water is cold, and it has an unmistakable odor. It is one of the most sensual moments of my far too lock-step day. Each day a different memory of water floats into my head as I resist the urge to get my hand out of the frigid wet.

The koi water and the water of my numerous aquaria are the only regular associations with water in my life, and I regret that. When I am feeling stress, I often think of water ... the open ocean at night, great rivers, and, most of all, the endless streams and lakes of northern Canada.

I remember when i was a teenager and a bunch of us were on some sort of camping expedition ... the details are foggy. My friend Peter, with whom I was secretly in love, and I filched a rowboat from some other campers. We paddled around in overgrown waterways. Suddenly, Peter dropped his glasses into a muddy byway. He stripped to his underwear and dove in. When he was gone, I was frozen in lust ... his all but naked body revealed. He surfaced, wet and pale white, gathered his breath, and plunged down again. He never found his glasses, and I have never recovered from that association of wet and the object of my ardent, teenage desires.

I thought of that today when the Washington Post published this photo:

Water is the other medium, other than air, where we vacation but where we do not live. Many are those whose lives are entirely bound into water. But they still live in air.

I hanker for water. My sainted ex, Richard, had a kayaking hobby for some time, and I vicariously kayaked with him. I still treasure the photos he took when surrounded entirely by water in Alaskan fjords.

Water drives history, of course, and it will drive the torments that await us in the next centuries. I have been reading Mesopotamian history, and we know that hydraulics lie underneath the economics that created empire and power and majesty. But, curiously, the Mesopotamians set water to the side of their cosmological views, and worshiped instead air and sky in the "persons" of Enlil and Marduk. Water surrounded and undergirded. But it was never the center.

Last evening, it rained just a little ... enough that I took the cushions off the yard chairs.

The first time I visited Berlin, I sat by the fountain in Kufurstendamm one morning, transfixed simultaneously by the fountain itself and some passing beauty seated on the other side of me. I had no camera, so I have no record. But the fountain took on that extra meaning of unrequited lust. The last time I visited Berlin, I tried to find that moment again. Instead, I found a great fountain.

Water is like that. We trace our passions in it, and it washes them away.

We never touch the same water twice. Though we try.

Top photo by Arod of fountain at the Major Research University where I wet wash for wages; middle photo from the news today; bottom photo from by Arod from Berlin.

The Ancients Whisper: Further Notes on Mesopotamian Religion

2009-07-10T19:34:00.000-07:00

I have moved on from Mesopotamia to a campy "popular" history of Egypt, Barbara Mertz's Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs. But I did not express to my own satisfaction in my last post the underlying dialectics of ancient Mesopotamian religion. So here goes ...

The fact of the Mesopotamian additive, accumulative, and mechanical listing and doubling approach to imagining the influence of the divine upon everyday life does not mean that there was not a dialectic going on. Mechanical thinking is, I would assert, only a rhetorical means of approaching the expression of the irreducible dialectics of being and living. What that means in the concrete is that the pragmatic side of Mesopotamian religion was not burdened with a supervening transcendence which could obscure its practicality and tolerance as opposed to what came later ... religion as repression and exclusive monomania.

This was the contribution of the ancient Hebrews. I hasten to pre-credential myself ... that is to cover my derrière ... by noting that my speculations on ancient Hebrew religion express nothing of my lifelong love of the Jewish cultural influence on Western society. I have never written about that here, and I will have to do so at some point. But the ancient Hebrews effected a revolution in thought that transformed the ambient pan-cultural and accumulative religious system into a "national," exclusive, and substitutive one. Where any individual or community could choose from a pantheon which divinity they preferred as their intercessor and defender, the Hebrews required allegiance to one god. By that move, they had to create a god who transcended the mechanical relationship between the divine and the real ... in other words, no longer was each event or moment the result of a narrative or an approachable decision maker, but now all reality was transcendentally controlled ex nihilo by one supervening and enveloping totality.

Monotheism ... what a curse. And a fraud ... because the high level notion of the great oneness never quite matches up with the on-the-ground practical need for intercession, exorcism, and help. That ultimately is where Christianity with its Jesus myth and Islam with its countless Sufi and Shia cults came in to "liberate" Hebrew religion from its ethnic cubbyhole and remake it into popular, boundary-less, and transmissible religious systems. The persistence of Hebrew religion among Jews over the millennia as the most pure of monotheisms is one of the most remarkable stories in human history. There's no go-between for the Jews and their god.

But that is not what I want to address right now.

Hebrew religion served as the transmission belt for the worst aspects of Mesopotamian religion ... its at-bottom nihilism, the dialectic of blinding brilliance and dispiriting terror. Its hopeless view of human life as coming from nowhere and ending in nothingness.

As I have been re-reading ancient history, I am simultaneously obsessed with wondering what it was like to live then, and ensnared by the horror that their obsessions with hopelessness and terror infected all of human history ... the venom that Fred Phelps and, today sadly, the SCLC spew against those they revile is the transmogrified religious system of Uruk in the fourth millennium B.C.E.

Transmogrified ... in other words, it is not that Mesopotamian religion was filled with hatred, for it did not seem to be. It was filled with dread. But dread plus monotheism equals hatred.

It's reasonably easy to assign reasons for the small steps in history ... why Prussia beat France in 1870, or why Octavian won at Actium. But it is difficult to understand what the particular impetuses are behind the huge earthquakes. As the aforementioned Barbara Mertz speculates, why did Egypt rapidly move from a millennia-old string of villages splayed down a river to a great, unified kingdom that would last for millennia? And why after 3500 years did Mesopotamian religion go into an occlusion, only to re-emerge with a vengeance in the era of Constantine and conquer the as yet unimagined Western world? Why was faith, the successor to the fatalism of the Mesopotamians, able not just to conquer reason, the concomitant and anointed successor to Greco-Roman religion, but to harness reason to its own purposes? Why was reason not able to crush the last stingy upwelling of the Mesopotamian miasma?

Of course, I pose these things from my own perspective. Plenty are those, blithely ignorant of the Babylonian genesis of the christ myth, who shudder in ecstasy at having that special intercessor ... just as the Mesopotamians shivered as they performed their rituals to whatever intercessor they might choose.

So this is not felicitous prose ... I know it ... but I leave you with this question: what determines which ancient historical dynamics turn out to be unextinguishable? I think that is why I read history.

The Ancients Whisper: Mesopotamian Religion

2009-07-08T19:15:00.000-07:00

I have been reading the superb Jean Bottéro's Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia (1998; tr from French to English 2001). So these are notes about what I take away from the last couple of months of reading about ancient Mesopotamia, focused on religion; I will stick in a few page references so I can get back to the source when I re-read this down the road.

I want to make five points:

1. Lists

The ancient civilization that we can describe came into view because of scribes and writing and the need to keep track of the accumulation of goods at temples. I do not want to try to describe the flux and reflux of religion and state, or priest and king, and I do not want to make too broad an assertion about the role of religion in the rise of civilization. But writers ... without the scribes, there is no civilization. And they started with lists. Once they made lists, other scribes coped the lists. Whenever Sumerian gave way to Akkadian and became a classical, liturgical language, scribes made translation lists. There were lists of gods, lists of omens, lists of goods.

The listing behavior is evidence of a society whose thinking is mechanical and additive. Indeed, it is easy for us in the modern world to forget that the vast majority of people throughout time have lived in societies which describe their life world in additive, mechanical ways. The careful reader of my scratch-post will recollect that my own academic work concerned the nature of writing in a radically oral society in which a caste of scribes and writers produced writing to be recited to the non-literate and owned by the powerful. The three millennia of Mesopotamia fits precisely in this zone.

So think of that caste of writers. They spent their lives learning the complexities of cuneiform. By the time they became "journeymen" they had copied hundreds of texts and immersed themselves in a long past that was constant, in which change was a terrifying irruption that had no basic impact on how lives were led or how the universe was imagined.

We do not know the lines between scribes and priests. Indeed, we know that there are sundry types of priests, but we are not sure what each type did or how one type related to another. But we do know that the lists upon lists were he closest thing to what we would call scripture, and that the lists were mnemonic devices to remind people how to encounter the divine, how to influence the forces, ow to make the best of what all admitted was a dark and foreboding reality.

Now lists can have more than one element, and this is key. They had lists that gave the Sumerian name followed by the Akkadian name of a god. They had lists that described an event followed by what the event portended. But once you have a list, why not get more lists, and so ...

2. The ancients in the near East favored accumulation over substitution (82). In other words, they liked to add gods, but they never fully discarded a god even if he fell from centrality. An gave way to Enlil who gave way to Marduk. But none of them was banished.

The dialectical frame of mind always sees in the confrontation of elements the immanent possibility of the destruction of one, or both, and the transformation of a counterposed pair into a new, "higher" singularity, itself subject to further contradiction. That is not the way of the ancients. They were compound, not complex, in their explanation of reality. Again, additive ... one explanation did not preclude another. One set of gods did not preclude another. Indeed, for much of time, one king did not preclude another, notwithstanding the periodic impulses to empire.

The additive or accumulating mindset is coincident with the religious notion that the divine world and the material world are roughly parallel if not thereby equivalent. Which leads to ...

3. Doubling the visible world (44). The fundamental conception of the divine among the ancient Mesopotamians was to see in the divine world a parallel structure to the experienced world. Every item or force in the real world had a corresponding and decisive force in the divine world. Nothing happened in the real world without the impetus of the divine world. This is the source, obviously of the accumulating tendency.

We know, of course, that reality is a bitch. And we must assume that, prior to penicillin and modern dentistry, the bitchiness of life was the more acute. So the ancients saw a divine world in which the gods created human beings in order to feed them and so that they did not have to work. This is the source of the elaborate feeding the gods ceremonies of which we have textual evidence. But the ancients didnot feed the gods just because they felt a duty to do so. They fed them because they feared their wrath if they were not fed.

This doubling of the material world was grounded in a conception of the gods as fearful, evoking brilliance and terror (39). If the divine world doubled our own, then what happened in our own world was beyond our direct control. We are the victims of the whims of the gods, alive only to serve them.

Of course, people always want to negotiate with fate, and Bottéro makes a brilliant argument about how exorcism supplanted magic as the primary way in which people approached the gods. In his argument, magic is just a technique intervention. But exorcism relies on the notion that a person by failing to perform a required duty to the gods has sinned, and therefore been punished by some divine flick of the wrist. So if the supplicant can only find the right way to approach the god and mollify and compensate him, then perhaps the god will reverse the punishment. Just as one would approach an angry monarch, or an angry landlord, or an angry judge.

The doubling concept of heaven and earth reflected, then, being trapped in a concept of society and hierarchy. "Reverence, admiration, and self-effacement with respect dominate in the texts." (40) And just as in society one could not deal with everything, so it was in the divine. One had to choose, based upon one's place.

Interlude: allow me to quote a text just for the purpose of tasting how the ancients wrote, albeit the odors faint and elusive.

How long has the river risen and brought the overflowing waters,
so that the dragonflies drift down the river?
The face that could gaze upon the face of the Sun
has never existed ever.
How alike are the sleeping and the dead. (105-6)

Or how about:

I will praise the lord of wisdom, solicitous god,
Furious in the night, growing calm in the day:
Marduk! lord of wisdom, solicitous god,
Furious in the night, growing calm in the day:
Whose anger is like a raging tempest, a desolation,
But whose breeze is sweet as the breath of morn.
In his fury not to be withstood, his rage the deluge,
Merciful in his feelings, his emotions relenting.
The skies cannot sustain the weight of his hand,
His gentle palm rescues the moribund. (190)

Ah, Semitic religion. Then, as now, filled with terror and darkness, where the solicitude of the god is not expected but rejoiced upon should it make its occasional entry.

4. The Personal God. Bottéro argues that Mesopotamian religion was not precisely polytheism, but rather henotheism which "admits the plurality of the gods but is interested in and attached at least hic et nunc, to only one of them" (41).

First of all hic et nunc ... Latin, here and now ... how obnoxious is it that a 2001 translation into English chooses to assume that most of its readership will have enough Latin to know hic et nunc ... now, I am proud that I do, but it is s silly pride given that I am old and one of a tiny minority of folks who plans to take up Latin again when I retire so I can read Catullus and chuckle.

But more to the point, hic et nunc: here and now. Notwithstanding that ancient Mesopotamian civilization lasted longer than the period of time that separates us from Homer ... think about that ... their religion was always focused on the hic et nunc.

Onward ... the personal god ... in a divine world that is a doubled and powerful mirror of the real world, there is a madness of gods. Just as the individual in society has a particular life, so he should have a particular god. I think you see this in India nowadays as well. The individual picks a god who shares, on the other side, roughly his position in the hierarchy. And he goes to that god for help and for mitigation of the problems and miseries of life.

What goes on in the central temples and near royalty are far from the average person. And this accumulating and doubling religion provides him with this answer, a personal god. It is worth noting that we know about this aspect of Mesopotamian religion because of lists of personal names that celebrate the relationship of a given person to a particular god.

But lest we get too euphoric, we have to remember that this religion was gloomy and dark, with no release from fate for the individual. Your personal god, or your relationship with an exorcist priest, might mitigate the miseries of the moment. Butnothing could save you from deth ... that is the lesson of the first great epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh. We are all doomed to die, and thereafter to inhabit a dark world of shadwos with the future or past, not prospects, no activities, no change, no joy.

5. Hell, evil, fate. We have little indication of the exact nature of the cosmology in which our forefathers believed for three millennia. The reason for that is that the scribes did not write treatises on religion or the structure of the universe. They made lists.

But we know that there was a place "under" where the departed went. They did not have a notion of the soul per se. And there does not appear to be a separation between the good and the evil. There does appear to be some sort of hierarchical differentiation ... one cold hardly expect kings to live forever in the "under" with peasants.

But this was a gloomy notion of the end of life. Remember that the gods created human beings so that they could be fed without working. So the reward, such as it was, for a long life spent feeding the gods was a shadowing eternity in this frozen nowhere.

Evil was the result of the gods being angered at the failure of human beings. The Mesopotamians did not have demons per se. But the gods were capable, idiosyncratically, of terrible moods, vengeful actions particularly directed against hose who neglected them. That said, even in the ancient world, there were skeptics who wondered why the pious might get sick while the wicked might get rich.

The brilliance and the terror of the divine. The joys and the fears of life. Parallels.

Photos by Arod of the rather few Mesopotamian relics in local museums. I hope to add the descriptions soon enough.

Sarah and Sonia

2009-07-03T20:01:00.001-07:00

Is there no limit to the soulless stupidity of the 'publican extremists? Did you watch the bizarre performance of soon-to-be-ex-governor of Alaska Sarah Palin today? How any rational commentator could actually think that this was a strategy to win the presidency is hard to fathom.

Both right and left like to pander to the masses while actually insulting such intelligence as the public, whatever that may be, actually exhibits. But the public would have to be criminally moronic to believe that today's free association madness merited anything more than a quick trip to the loony bin. The nonsensical, non-syntactic stringing of right-wing cliche, the winks and nods, the bizarre thought structures, the grating syncopations of voice ... well ... at this point, anyone who still credits John McCain with a lick of sense is simply not paying attention.

I am one of those who believe that there is a massive scandal licking at her heels. The fact that she has an eternal diabolic optimism should not hide the fact that she is a liar, a thief, a self-centered bitch ... that's a technical term, folks, and we know what it means. She'd eat her children for breakfast if they weren't so unappetizing.

But then again, perhaps she is marginally brighter, at least in the exercise, than the slobbering 'publican-heel-licking median "pundints" ... the "n" is deliberate ... she knows she has no political future, and she also knows that she can make a pot of money from the cynics at Fox. So why wait. Strike while the bones are still warm.

Levi Johnson is looking better all the time ... check out his shirt-free pics at GQ ... you have to watch the slideshow.

Meanwhile, the professional gasbags of 'publican prevarication have unleashed another wave of immodest, feigned-innocent horror at the Nazi-Stalinist, racist-anti-American Justice-in-waiting Sotomayor. Good lord. The real terror is that she, like many liberals, covers her sharp angles with a crypto-conservatism that eventually becomes a lifestyle. What happens if she and Scalia get buddy-buddy and decide that they have a novel "founders'-intent" theory on homosexuality ... something like the recently floated Obama line that the ban on gay marriage is actually the grant of the unboundaried civil right to marry anyone of the opposite sex that you want to. Her conservatism on crime is of the the infamous type that grants that the law, in its majesty, forbids the theft of bread by rich and poor alike.

She doesn't impress me. Obviously she is better than the other of-color Justice who recently opined that there is no constitutional protection against strip-searching 13-year-olds on less than the grounds of reasonable suspicion. But that is not saying much.

Don't get me wrong; I want her confirmed. But we have to face the fact that the 'publicans are so bereft of civic consciousness let alone intelligence in the face of threats to the Republic that they will suicide-bomb every single step taken by any opponent.

Alas, this is the state of the Republic on the eve of the Glorious Fourth.

On that unhappy note ... on to that Glorious Fourth. In our home, we plan to celebrate the revolution against kings and authoritarianism with seared flesh, unusual ales, and Fish-House Punch.

Photos by Arod ... top photo of a San Francisco sidewalk, and bottom photo of a display from last year's July 4 BBQ chez moi; we won't have those flags this year as my wonderful friend June, who supplied them, is unable to attend.

Love in the Era of Obama - and O Canada!

2009-07-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

It's July 1, a big day in my life. It marks the 142nd anniversary of Canada's semi-independence. It is the 16th anniversary of the death of my first lover and not-coincidentally the 16th anniversary of when my now sainted ex and I decided to yoke our fates as one.

So love of country, love of my lost beloved, and love of my extant but now only sainted beloved ... this one is for love.

If gay people have anything to teach, it is that the conquering power of love ennobles and enables. Love makes no sense, but there is no sense in not loving. The loathing of the loathers is our lot ... and there is certainly some satisfaction in the present era when at long last the plurality if not yet the majority understand that we are about loving.

In that sense, I think the liberal glee at the fall of Mark Sanford, fundamentalist governor of South Carolina caught in a mad and unlikely love affair with an Argentine, is rather unseemly. What we ought to be saying is not that he is a hypocrite ... hypocrisy in love, dear friends, is as old as prostitution, that oldest of "vices". No, we ought to be pointing out that inconvenient love is as ancient as humanity. So his wife of 20 years is left in the dust ... you know what, this too is an old story. The man fell in love, and it was all so wrong. But love conquers all.

If only he were not a religious bigot who looks to Bathsheba and David to justify his more unseemly grip on power, then perhaps he might just stand up and say, I understand that love is not something that state or religion should seek to control or undermine. What I found on a dance floor in Argentina is just the same as what two awkward dudes found in each other one night in an old Chevy.

But, alas, he is a religious bigot. And, alas, the liberal bloviators love to hold religious bigots to the hypocrisy of their religious bigotry. I say "no" ... tell him that love is its own justice. Tell him to give unto others the respect for love that he asks be given to him. Ask him to learn from his lesson in love.

We might also ask Obama to learn a little. His speech to the quickly assembled gay Appropriati (think Illuminati who have been handed a little badge of appropriateness) was nothing less than nauseating. In his audience, in the White House, was an officer with 18 years of service who is soon to face an administrative proceeding that will inevitably turf him out of the military to which he has dedicated his life. Because he is gay. And to add insult to injury, he was ordered not to wear his uniform, notwithstanding that he is currently an active officer in good standing, lest someone think it political. Obama's message: trust me and wait. Sure ... should the 266 men and women thrown out of the military under Obama's watch wait. What are they waiting for? Someone needs to tell this s.o.b. that he is the Commander-in-Chief. What is he afraid of?

But this is about love. It is obvious that the love affair between Barack and Michelle has been transformative ... more so, obviously, for Barack than Michelle, it seems to me. I always wonder how it can be that someone who encounters a transformative experience fails to translate that into understanding the impact of transformation on others. In other words, when someone is in love, how can they not acknowledge the love of others. I do not think Barack Obama is President without the influence of Michelle. One iota of that realization should be enough for him to realize that he should acknowledge the love that others feel.

It is harder to imagine a man like Sanford projecting his experience in inconvenient love to others. But we should not eschew him for loving.

So back to July 1. In 1993, my first lover, then my first ex, died on Canada Day in Vancouver of the plague. I spent 10 days with him as he lay dying. Bad Subjects published a reminiscence on his death that I wrote in 1993. He was unconscious when I left and died a few days later. Richard moved in to my apartment on July 1. We called ourselves sidekicks, but that night we got drunk in grief and we decided to be lovers, and that lasted for a decade. So July 1 is the death of my first lover and the anniversary of my third.

My love life does not fit into the convenience of gay marriage. It is not the narrative that goes on billboards. But it is mine and it still fills me with emotion and thrill. The truth is that many love lives do not fit the billboard model. Sanford's doesn't. Obama's does.

The job of the state is to stay out of the bedroom. The job of the state is to facilitate the civil nature of human relationships. Canadians of my generation will remember Justice Minister, later Prime Minister, Trudeau announcing that the state had no business in the bedrooms of the nation. That declaration was part of what led to Trudeaumania and his election as Prime Minister. But here, on Canada Day, it is a lesson that Obama, in love with his wife, still does not grok.

So Happy Birthday Canada. I still love you, Gaetano, and think of you every day. And I still love you, Richard, even though I know how much better we are for being friends and not mates.

Photos by Arod from Gay Day in San Francisco, 2009. All my photos from Gay Day are on Flickr.

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Gay Day

2009-06-28T17:53:00.000-07:00

I spent the day at the Gay Pride Parade on Market Street and Celebration in Civic Center. As last year, I focused on taking photos, mostly candid people shots, but I spent more time with friends ... bumped into a bunch of people, and spent some time with old and new friends at the Faerie tent. (For those of you who do not know who the Radical Faeries are, google it or wait until I explain some time ... one of the advantages of vowing to post thrice weekly is that I have to keep a bunch of easy topics that I have pre-prepared in my mind at ready hand.)

Gay Day is at bottom a lonely and nostalgic time for me ... I think it's that for a lot of old gay activists, although perhaps I am on the tedious, self-involved end of the maudlin/giddy continuum.

But I don't want this to be about my moping around snapping pix of hot guys and odd beings and the occasional out-there dyke. So ...

It was my impression that this year was bigger and more enthused than last year. It also felt less political. All this is decidedly impressionistic, and the evidence is only my own observations as I wandered up Market Street and then around Civic Center for five hours.

Last year we had a victory that was exhilarating but felt ephemeral. Couples were married on the square, and the celebration seemed to focus on that. We did not yet know that Obama would be President, and we had not yet experienced the crushing defeat in the Prop campaign. But we had also not experienced the palpable juggernaut that the last months have been. The mass acceptance of gay people is moving forward at a staggering rate after four decades of glacially slow increments in polled percentages.

We are at a tipping point, and the celebration reflected that.

I noticed many more young gay men than last year. In fact, Civic Center was crawling with them. It was broiling hot today, and so many were semi clad. I do not know why there were so many more ... perhaps the celebration has become the place to be and be seen. The young dykes were there in force as they were last year. They are tribal and defiant and out there. The young gay guys notice my camera with a little disdain, but the young dykes don't seem to even see me. Maybe some time I will try to discuss the generation gap among gay folks, but I increasingly do not think it is very important. Because young gay people accept their rights as given and undeniable. They did not originate in an era when we were hidden and rightly afraid. I love their native defiance.

But beyond the young gay folks, the most obvious phenomenon is how broadly diverse the audience is. Drag queens, folks in wheelchairs, families of every descriptions, countless young straight folks digging a festival tht is as native to them as it is to us. And there are faeries, leather folks, nude people and lots of folks in nothing but briefs. Diesel dykes by the boatload ... I still get chills hearing the Dykes on Bikes roar up Market Street leading off the parade as they have for many years.

Our movement is at a tipping point. We are on the verge of a cascading set of victories. There are no guarantees, and the condition of our brothers and sisters in other places ... Iran and Iraq and the rest of the muslim world, Russia and Poland, Africa ... is something we cannot forget. But in the rational part of the western world, our humanity is increasingly the property of everyone ... religious bigots and troglodytes excepted.

I did not hear a lot of the speeches today. I do not even know if there were any because the umpteen musical performances scattered at all corners drowned everything out. But, what was lacking today anywhere ... in the parade, the signs, the buttons, the mood ... was acknowledgment that the biggest proximate obstacle we face in these United States in taking advantage of this historical tipping point is Barack Obama. His old-fashioned low-bore anti-gay revanchism provides comfort to our enemies and it impedes the break out. Everybody wants it to be a feel good era, a feel good day. But reality intervenes. DOMA and DADT should be blown up. Post haste. Get it over with. But with the powerful, whenever it is gay people at issue, suddenly everything gets quiet. Gay and quiet never mesh.

So it was a great day, a loud day. But we missed an opportunity. Our great day, no matter how broad and diverse it as become, is a day when we speak to power. We did not do that. So here's my bit

Obama, get in the game!

Gay Rights Now!

Photos by Arod, all taken today. More to come on Flickr, and I will let you know.

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Notes on Iran

2009-06-26T19:29:00.000-07:00

The New York Times spit it right out, albeit only at the bottom of the article - Iran has been the victim of a slow moving coup in which a coterie of quasi-Islamo-military-fascists have taken over the key institutions of the state. I note that they do not mention the army, and given the role of the armed forced in abandoning the Shah in 1979, that is a key omission.

The best take would be that a small coterie around Ahmadinejad, which increasingly isolates itself by its intransigence and extremism, is setting itself up for a cataclysmic fail. That would take a long while and many, many lost lives and horrible torments. The worst take is that that coterie consolidates its grip on power by a sustained campaign of torture. heard on TV news today that the scabrous Khatami has called for extreme punishments, and specifically capital punishments for the leaders of the opposition.

The Iranians have held mass executions before ... it only takes a little googling to find some horrific images. They will do it again. They lust after blood. They have no shame. There are not words to describe how horrifying is a theocratic regime, especially in its military-fascist phase.

But maybe, just maybe, these obscene excuses for human beings are themselves on the way to a gallows of their own construction, much as the hapless and venemous Saddam.

But to get back to my point ... this is about the state. The state is decrepit, and eventually it must fail spectacularly. But eventually can be a month or a year or a decade. If it is years, the cost will be staggering.

It is all up to the army. That's the way I see it.

Dizzy by Daylight

2009-06-24T20:27:00.000-07:00

What does one do when the mind is awash .. awash with what will have to wait for subsequent recollection.

That's what I feel like.

On the train this morning as we arc-ed down that same well-streaked path, I glanced up from Bottero's Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia to notice a tallish, dirty blond middle aged man in dumpster-diver couture pissing into the bushes some 20 feet from the tracks. Imagine if you can ... the entire right side of a train full of office workers on their way to still extant if not secure employment gazes briefly in passing as you piss in public. Some people do not have the sense to step 5 feet into the bush so that no one sees them.

Perhaps he thinks like this ... I'll give all those office workers a little thrill of self-satisfied disgust and piss for them in plain view. Maybe this was the highlight of his week.

See ... I want to blog something meaningful, but all I can think about is folks like me ...in the broadest sense ... who live in Tehran. So all the meanderings and observations pale when we know in our guts that there are people just like us being cut up and tortured and killed for merely suggesting that they ought to have the simple freedom of saying that I do not agree.

I loathe religious bigotry ... and all of religion is a sort of immanent bigotry ... but contemplating it in the context of lives lost and the terror of even waking up in a society like Iran. Wow.

Remember folks that the hell of Iran is what the fundies have in mind for us. No ... not remember ... never forget that religion in power kills and maims and tortures.

Meanwhile, the pisser referenced above will live on oblivious. Trains will still run, derelicts will urinate on bushes. But things happen, and lives are destroyed.

Perhaps that is why I prefer to spend my commute time in ages past. The pain of the present, unlike the pain of the past, is that it does not need to be this way. Even so, it still is.

The Mullahs and the Machine Guns

2009-06-20T12:37:00.001-07:00

As I write this, the sun has set in Iran. Chants of "Allahu Akbar" ring out across the rooftops in conscious imitation of the 1979 revolution. The bloodlusting basij re dragging people from their homes, beating them, killing some, kidnapping others to prisons and dungeons. it is not yet clear if the climactic moment has passed, if the protests has been subdued, or if tomorrow promises further action. The thugs apparently were fought to a standstill today, but that is not predictive of how it will turn out.

Of course, I do not actually know what is happening. To do a little pos and neg credentialing ... I am not an expert on Iran. I have read extensively about the Elamites, the Achaemenids, the Sasanids, the Safavids, and the coursing of Islam across Persia in the first Islamic centuries. My doctoral (Cal, 1998) research concerned premodern Malay Muslim manuscripture, and I have read widely in Islamic and Central Asian history. But not an expert in the modern Iranian state.

We hear little from actual experts. We hear a lot of self-credentialing from Twitter, and certainly Twitter has been a key source of information from inside Iran. I see no evidence that it has played a role in the events other than, perhaps, to embolden people to action knowing that the whole world knows. Most of the Twitter posts simply repeat in one form or another how important Twitter is; some of the posts propound rumors, and these posts are often retweeted; a few of the posts point to web footage or photos or analysis.

But nowhere have I seen a lot of analysis of the key issue at stake ... what is the state of the Iranian state, and how does its present composition portend for current events and future possibilities?

So, let me start by proposing a series of deductions, assumptions, and evident or apparent facts; I will try to credential them as I go along.

I would propose that there are five broad categories of actors in the current state, two in power, one contested, and two out of power. Those are the mullahs, the military and paramilitary forces, the Presidency, the legislative branch, and the people. None of these are simple or without contradiction.

The mullahs are actually a broad layer of society that crosses class, region, economics, ethnicity, political outlook, and involvement. It is an error to assume that the mullahs are supportive of or even corporately linked to the Guardian Council. I believe it is also an error to assume without proof in the events that the Guardian Council or Khamanei is in control of events.

The military, or as I will call them, the agencies of repression, are actually at least four forces: the army, the police, the Revolutionary Guard, and the basij. How they cooperate and by whom each are led is not clear to any of us on the outside. I think the key issues all come back to these facts.

The Presidency is obviously what is at issue. But we should note that Ahmadinejad is evidently not a toady of the mullahs. I do no think that is proven. There is good evidence that he represents a turn in the state towards the primacy of the repressive instruments and away from the primacy of the clerics, notwithstanding that often all of them at least on the surface appear to have the same interests.

The legislative branch is impotent and deeply divided and, if history is a guide, cowardly. But at any ripe moment it could begin to play a role.

The people, as always in history, are a cipher, everything and nothing by turns.

I believe that the state is increasingly dominated by a competition among agencies of repression acting largely independently, if also interdependently ... in other words they have some kind of communication and coordination of action, but their interests are not identical and they each reserve the right to independent initiative.

The one thing that mullahs, agencies of repression, and presidency share is that in this situation they want a return to the status quo ante, even though the status quo is obviously in flux irrespective of the popular movement that challenges all of them.

Who runs the army, and who makes the decisions? I suspect that the army is the most afraid of the current movement because its soldiery is representative of the population that is getting very tired of the slow militarization of society. There are numerous reports of troops refusing to fire, none confirmed. But in any revolutionary situation, the attitude of the troops is key ... look at how the troops slaughtered their innocent brothers and sisters in Burma and the movement was crushed.

Does Khamenei actually control the Revolutionary Guard, or is he slowly becoming a monarch in palace captivity? If Ahmadinejad indeed represents a turn to the military organizations, then curiously Khamenei could actually benefit from championing Moussavi who is an old ally; if he managed to trump the agencies of repression, he could establish himself as a Caesar figure, transcending and overshadowing competing class and political forces. But his pitiful speech at Friday prayers showed no inkling of any independent basis of action. He almost begged for everybody to return to the Iran of a week previous, and to forget all the unfortunate stuff. Sure, he threatened repercussions, but what specifically did he threaten? Which of the agencies of repression can he actually command? He can certainly order any of them to do what they already want to do. But can he rein any of them in? Can he coordinate them? Can he expertly craft a middle path? I don't think so.

I think he is a captive of the Revolutionary Guard and the Guard's more extremist supporters among the high-ranking mullahs, and I think they could topple him in a thrice. I have no actual evidence ... but history is filled with late dynasty monarchs who live at the pleasure of their imperial guard and the guard's allies in the bureau. Theocracy is always short lived ... the guys with the swords, or in the modern world the machine guns, eventually assume power for themselves.

Think of the Revolutionary Guard as the SS (from Nazi times) and think of the basij as the SA, the brownshirts, the semi-organized, anarchistic thugs, young underemployed males lusting to break heads in favor of an idea greater than them but beyond their ability to fully grok. Who actually controls the basij? More to the point, does anyone have the ability to rein them in? In the case of the Nazis, when it came time for the state to be in indubitable central control, Hitler unleashed the Night of the Long Knives, and slaughtered the SA without mercy.

No one in Iran, I would assert, has the power to slaughter the basij. And yet they are capable of independently determining the course of events right now. What is the coordination between the Revolutionary Guard and the basij? Who determines where they strike and who they beat up or kill and who they bust? Will it occur at some point that the Revolutionary Guard will have had their fill of these thugs?

Most importantly, if the popular movement overcomes the brutality now being unleashed, and if they manage to overturn the election, how does a revitalized legislative side deal with a self-entitled militia of thugs and killers?

Just to close the circle, I think the police are followers and not leaders. The dynamics of repressions play out among the army, the Revolutionary Guard, and the basij. The cops can hurt people, but I do not think they decide the issue.

The next days will probably see a lot of blood. But if the movement presses forward in a mass and peaceful manner, I think there is a possibility that the army pulls back from the brink. That is the only way that this does not turn into a colossal bloodbath. At that point, however, the captive palace (Khamenei and his band of mullah toadies) and the captors (the Revolutionary Guard and the overtly fascist wing of the mullahs) are threatened, and they have common cause with the basij. In that event, there is a real challenge to the status quo.

Remember that Moussavi is not a revolutionary. If Ahmadinejad represents a movement in the direction of a consolidated, statified militarism, Moussavi represents only a state which seeks to rule in its own name. The goals of the popular movement appear to be nothing more than the promise of the state as described by the constitution. But such a movement presents intolerable contradictions among the agencies of repression who operate with impunity and apparently independently of the authorized state agencies. So defeat will occur only in an epochal bloodbath, but victory promises another bloodbath of uncertain characteristics.

It is not a pretty picture. None of it portends the end of the world's most notorious theocracy. None of it portends freedom of the individual. Iran has decades of suffering to free itself from the curse of its modern history and ancient, martyr-obsessed and bloody religion.

All that said, every lover of freedom the world around admires and yearns for the success of these noble men and women who have stared vicious brutality in the face and said no to repression, yes to freedom.

Photos from around the web, but especially the Tehran Bureau which has excellent coverage, and boston.com which has an excellent collection of truly heart-rending photos.

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Notes on the News

2009-06-18T19:22:00.000-07:00

Iran

My good friend Ian, back from Borneo and documentary film making, notes an excellent analysis that increasingly it is apparent that the theological rule is a cover for a society run by the military and the militia. This would hardly be the first time in history that the palace has been seized by its soldiery. Khamenei never particularly struck me as a man whose command is law, but rather as a perfunctory monarch who nods and waves and issues obvious orders. Ahmadinejad, notwithstanding his little contretemps with the mullahs, represents a new step in the development of a tinpot fascism, one that is ahead of the clerical wave.

So, if that is true, the question for the revolution is how to prevent the incipiently fascist regime and its official and unofficial muscle from unleashing an epochal massacre. It's hard to imagine that the whole thing does not end up that way. But I do not believe that the initiative is in the hands of Khamenei. It is possible that the leadership of the military/militia is insufficiently unitary, and that a move is made that fails by reason of its breaking ranks withe other sectors. In other words, it is not always he who moves first who wins. Sometimes, the first one out of the trenches takes the first bullet.

Obviously impossible to predict. But we are not hearing any speculation on the moves of the actual power-holders who can move or restrain the forces that have the ability to kill a million people. Because in any theology, or leastwise any regime which draws it authority from gawd, it is always a matter of how many die and how and by whose hand.

But if the military/militia analysis of the state is valid, then agian and once again it comes down to whether soldiers obey orders to kill civilians. Assume that the militia can never be won over. But soldiers are form the same strata as the protesters, and they can be turned.

Nonetheless, this will end in blood. The question is whose blood. I am not optimistic. But I know only what I read on Twitter. Perhaps the underlying forces are ripe.

Twitter

What can I say. I love Twitter. Follow me at arodsf. Being so close to the literary action in Iran via Twitter has been compelling. The role of social media in out world in the future is still to be written ... but given the ominous signs and the forces at work, will Twitter become the obituary column for human hopes ... ooops, don't mean to be a downer.

Obama and the Gays

Funny how the DOJ brief to the court on DOMA seems to have been a tipping point for understanding that the Obama administration is a disappointment at this point. Bill Maher, MSNBC's Ed, and chorus of the blogosphere ... everybody is suddenly wiling to say it out loud. This guy's soft shoe is now a sellout. We're not convinced any more.

What an obscene dog and pony show when Obama, his body language exuding annoyance, signed the ludicrously limited and untested benefits for federal employee domestic partners. Talk about crumbs from the table ... leftovers for the uninvited guests who just wouldn't leave no matter all the not-so-subtle hints. I don't buy it ... not for one second.

But say this much ... the wave of revulsion at that DOJ brief forced the White House to put that dog and pony show together mighty fast. Remember the law of unintended consequences. Obama's little flick of the wrist in our direction may be a tipping point. I detect virtually no public outrage ... the 'publicans, of course, are busy clamming up about the latest family-values-fascist caught with his penis out of his pants. SO when legislation comes up for votes, I think it becomes increasingly obvious that the penalty for a pro-gay vote may be nothing.

Still the stink of complacency hangs about the White House. I do not want to think that it is too late for him to become a game changer. But the present evidence is not inspiring.

I Love Animals

But the notion that PETA is mad because Obama expertly killed a fly is beyond ludicrous. We are a society where any fixation devolves into madness instantly. But defending the rights of house flies ... isn't that the last straw?

No pics today ... just want to bang out a post and chill ... work is building up ... four major web sites to go live before classes start in September. Wow. Kinda thrilling; I guess I actually get some kind of charge out of deadlines.

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Why the Obama Administration is Anti-Gay

2009-06-16T07:24:00.001-07:00

There are two questions here: Why do I think that the Obama administration is anti-gay, and what are the reasons behind the Obama administration's anti-gay politics, policies, and actions?

I like to make a clear distinction between the homophobic and the anti-gay. Homophobia is psychological, social, cultural, personal. Anti-gay refers to the realm of politics, policy, and action. Either can refer to attitudes or notions. In most instances, the homophobic and the anti-gay overlap, but not in every instance. In arguing that the Obama administration is anti-gay, I do not argue that it or any of its members are homophobic ... there is no evidence on that, though lots of us are starting to have some suspicions.

The term anti-gay was common parlance in the gay liberation circles in which I traveled in the 70s. We commonly used it to describe the politics, policies, and actions of the majority of liberal and left groups who were at best openly embarrassed by us and thought that we provided fodder to their enemies. They most assuredly didn't like the loud, swarming, irreverent, open fags that we were.

The Obama administration shares this attitude: they want gay people to sit down, shut up, and wait. "It's not time, yet." "We support you, but there are bigger issues now that we have to attack." Just leave it to us, we will do the right thing when the time is right.” The one difference is that our liberal opponents in the 70s were not quite as nice about it as that. But nice and a DOJ brief will get you a DOJ brief. We don't care about nice.

The success of gay liberation arose wholly because we did not sit down, shut up, or wait. We viewed those who told us to do so then as enemies of our movement, and we should have the same attitude now. (That includes the HRC whose leader complained to Obama in a recent letter of the "pain" the DOJ brief caused ... hey, dude, it's not about some vague feeling of discomfort. It's about the blatant breach of our civil rights.)

That is why the Obama administration is anti-gay.

So, question number 2: what are the reasons behind the Obama administration's anti-gay politics, policies, and actions? I think the answer is obvious, and it is deeply disturbing. Just as Obama's failure to lead on gay rights at this tipping point for our movement is a signal of his now undeniable general reluctance to lead, so the reasons behind the anti-gay politics of his administration signal a larger and depressing fall back to the most retrograde characteristics of American politics.

So let's start with the anti-gay attitudes that we should just wait, that Obama is a "fierce" (yawn) defender of gay civil rights, that he is wisely picking the right time. This sort of argument relies on a zero-sum game political arithmetic. Obama only has so much political capital, and he needs to spend that on the big priorities.

This is reactionary and defeatist.

Political capital is not some storehouse in which gray-complected minions tote up the points scored and spend them parsimoniously; political capital exists only in its exercise. Obama shows in his political arithmetic an almost exclusive orientation to his right. Notwithstanding that the Republicans have given him nothing, nada, zip, he continues to court them. In the meanwhile, as many note, the public political dialogue centers almost exclusively on the madness of the far right against cool hand Luke Obama.

This attitude of engaging his opponents as friends and ignoring his friends as if they were opponents reveals a mechanical calculation rather than a dialectical approach ... arithmetic over calculus ... counting up rather than mobilizing ... electoralism against social change. Obama is looking to the next election, and that is the manner in which he most apparently resembles his predecessor.

In that context, think this through: Obama announces that he has ordered the military to suspend all activities surrounding DADT. The policy will remain in place as the brass figures out how to move forward; but not a single wooden nickel is to be spent on enforcing it. Rush Limbaugh goes into a frenzy ... and Obama makes a joke about it and invites a group of military Arabic translators, two of whom are gay, to the White House and praises the intelligence of the soldiery. The whole thing would be over in a flash.

So why doesn't he do it?

Imagine this, if you will: instead of slobbering like a sycophant about DOMA, the administration issues an opinion that DOMA raises the issue of the breadth of the 14th Amendment. We invite the court to comment. Rush Limbaugh goes into a frenzy .... and Obama makes a joke about it and invites a group of foster parents, two of whom are gay, to the White House and praises the commitment of ordinary Americans to do the right thing and raise children to be good citizens. The whole thing would be over in a flash.

So why doesn't he do it?

I think he doesn't do it because his political calculations are already focused on winning the next election. That is to say, Obama does not actually believe that he can be a paradigm changer like Roosevelt; he does not actually believe that a decade from now we could have a society in which as many accepted commonplaces changed as did from, say, 1930 to 1940, or 1940 to 1950. Obama is an incrementalist, not a radical.

His approach to gay civil rights in this seems to be a very exact calculation. Self-identified gays represent perhaps 3% of the electorate, and Obama gets 90% of those votes come hell or high water. But if evangelicals represent 20% of the electorate, and if he aspires to lock down 40% of them, then we are looking at 8% of the electorate. I figure that Obama figures that the 40% of evangelicals he can lock down are not fixated on the old culture war nonsense, that they are more focused on the activist side of christianity including a rising commitment to social justice especially among young evangelicals. But sin is still sin for them, so there is no upside from this arithmetic in goading them by openly supporting gay civil rights. This is why we are now hearing the highest ranking gay toadies on the Democratic side (including, sadly, Barney Frank) refer us to the second term in office!

So Obama is anti-gay because the arithmetic is bad, and he does arithmetic not calculus in his inner circles of political calculation. If that is the case, then the lie of his presidency is deeper than most of us thought, and the chances that this is a turning point in US history are dashed.

Depressing. The only answer is opposition. This president needs to feel the heat from his left flank. Gay people should lead the way.

Photos by Arod of the San Francisco City Hall demonstrations after Prop 8 passed, November 15, 2008.

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On Heterosexuality

2009-06-14T20:39:00.000-07:00

This has ended up being a very long ramble. I take a risk here because I engage in what I like to call "pure speculation" about heterosexuality ... by "pure speculation", I mean speculation unencumbered by fact or reference or proof, and founded upon the ramblings of my own mind. I do not want to offend anyone. But dynamics that we all experience deserve playing out and talking about. I believe in transparency, and I believe in making mistakes, especially of interpretation, in aid of finding your way forward. So here goes.

I spent the afternoon with my excellent friend Roy Ortopan at the American Conservatory Theater's production of Edward Albee's new and not so new At Home at the Zoo. So, spoiler alert, I plan to reveal anything I feel like, so those of you who might want to see this exquisite production should consider bookmarking these scribblings for future reference.

The play is a combination of two acts: the first act is new writing and concerns a discussion about matters of relationship and sex between a long-married couple Peter (Anthony Fusco) and Ann (René Augesen), both long-time regulars at ACT. It has the form of a prequel to the second act which is Albee's iconic first playThe Zoo Story, written in 1958. So a little criticism to start ... the first act exhibited the exquisite writing of a , each line crafted and yet natural. Augesen and Fusco oozed the comfortable relationship whose very smoothness is its own threat. The second act, Pinteresque in writing and in staging, is rougher, even coarser, with a long monologue in which Jerry (Manoel Feliciano) recounts to Peter a murderous story about a dog and works himself from accidental interlocutor to incarnate violence.

The unsettling nature of this production is in its interconnected but stylistically and emotionally distinct one-act plays. The challenge is to find the resistances that flow from the one to the other.

In the first act, set in an exquisite modernistic living room, white and sterile and clean, the exchanges between these comfortably married middle-aged Manhattanites expresses what I would call the inner dynamic of heterosexuality. That is, the dominance of the female irrespective of the power relationship, and therefore the alternating current of resistance and attraction to the female that is the dynamo of male heterosexuality. Let's lead by noting that there's a lot in that that is probably bullshit ... I mean that. But as a lifelong gay guy (notwithstanding an earnest and meaningful heterosexual relationship of 18 months at the end of my teenage years) I observe male heterosexuality as a sort-of alien force in the kitchen of my being. It is there, it is clearly real, and yet it is hard to quantify. It is passing difficult to quantify how the female principle drives straight men even as they alternately dominate it and submit to it.

I never fully accepted the inside game of feminism's more abstruse ideological perambulations. The obvious and ineluctable force of women demanding equality is not feminism ... I call that women's liberation, and I separate it from the ideological prescriptions of the high priestesses of feminism, especially in the 70s and 80s before they slowly faded from relevance in the face of rising female equality. So, a play like this throws light on our present post-feminist era. Women and men may continue to spar as they have done for centuries, but women have a better block from which to jump off than ever before, leastwise in Western society.

Ann presses her complacent husband to be dangerous. It is he who resists, who tells a story of the one time in his youth he was dangerous, and how it was terrifying and almost destroyed his life. This is a flip from stereotypes, because it is the female who is supposed to crave the secure and the predictable. But it is Peter who argues that he thought that they had agreed before marriage that theirs would be a peaceful and predictable journey where excitement was not at issue, but the pleasures of the long and the assured were in the fore.

There is no one heterosexuality, of course, any more than there is only one homosexuality. But one thing that distinguishes heterosexual men from exclusively homosexual men is that one way or another they must encounter the female principle in all its permutations. Gay men ... and this describes me to a T ... love women for the intelligence and wit and, most emphatically, their non-maleness. But the female principle "in all its permutations" we can take or leave. We don't live with it and we don't go home with it. Straight men do. The notion of the traditional chauvinist is that he pedestalizes women in order to wall himself off from those permutations; in other words, chauvinism is a way of isolating and crystalizing femaleness so that it can be used without interfering in the more fundamental and more powerful maleness which the chauvinist prefers.

There is another kind of chauvinist ... I call them "true heterosexuals." These are the men who are focused exclusively on women, and who hardly notice men at all. There are curiously few of these men. I had a lecturer in college who was a great influence on me and with whom I had many excellent conversations. But if there was a single woman present, I ceased to exist for him. I invited him once to my home for a slide show of a recent trip to Indonesia and we were having a rollicking conversation until a then temporary roommate, female and young and pretty, stopped by. He was gone; I never got him back.

But nowadays, notice how most coupled men ... and the more so the more urban or younger or more middle class they are ... foreground the female. Things as simple as walking a half step behind while girlfriend wife gabs on the cell phone (this drives me nuts), or as complex and laudable as the immersion in childcare or domesticity. It is that new convergence that Albee was expressing in his first act. But he is not afraid, as so many commentators are, to express the discomforts of the new prominence of the female in heterosexuality.

Peter found in his female approach to his marriage the comfort of taking the sting out of his masculinity. He complains at length ... and this gets plenty good laughs from the audience ... that his circumcision is retreating. Not that his foreskin is growing back, but that the glans of his penis is ever so infinitesimally disappearing under what foreskin was left by the surgeon's long-ago snip. Meanwhile, Ann complains that from time to time she wants Peter, whom she describes as a great lover and lousy fuck, to be dangerous, in essence to rape her with consent ... though she does not put it exactly that way.

So here we have the male principle slowly shrinking simultaneously happily and nervously, and the female principle casting around looking for the excitement that its very dominance precludes. Nice dialectics ... I love conundra like these. And as with the real world, there is no denouement, there is resolution. Life goes on, uneasily. You wonder if after this conversation they can return to the sweet satisfying lovemaking that Ann both accepted and rejected and that was all that Peter cared to do.

"Cared to do" ... because in the most violent portion of the conversation, Peter relates the one time when he was dangerous, when he had anally penetrated a woman and injured her, caused her to bleed sufficiently to send her to hospital, during a fraternity-sponsored initiation orgy long beforehand. Just that one brush with danger was enough for him, and the idea of role-playing violence with his gentle-voyage wife was thereby abhorrent.

Remember this ... it was blood and penetration forced upon Peter by the other that haunted him.

So the act wraps up with Peter leaving awkwardly to go for a walk with his book, to take a read in Central Park

Remember that the second act was written in 1958, and the language and staging is coarser. I would argue that this is both by reason of Albee's youth and by reason of the writing occurring before the rise of women's liberation. Jerry, a drifter, strikes up a conversation with Peter. From its inception, this conversation bristles with the implied violence of male-to-male heterosexual relations. That Jerry reveals in the course of the conversation that he has sexually hustled men only adds to that unexpressed violence. While in the first act, the audience is satisfied in a conversation that starts and ends essentially nowhere and travels from one indeterminate to another, in the second act, the audience knows that this cannot end well. Blood will be spilled; someone will die.

When straight men are together, they always bristle a little. It can be nice bristling, it can be humorous, vigorous, laidback. It can be any kind of bristling you want, but there is always at least a tiny charge. Perhaps it is almost as if everyone wants to put out a positive electrical charge to make sure that they all equally repel if they get too close. I think this is what explains the tendency to violence under the influence of alcohol, because the tiny positive electrical charge fades and suddenly, unexpectedly and most unwelcome, two men may find themselves too close.

I think that most men actually prefer the company of men ... notwithstanding my notion that the modern defusing of the male/female relationship leads to greater comfort between men and women. Because when men are together, the female principle no longer threatens or demands; it becomes a kind of icon for waving or saluting or acknowledging or, mostly, ignoring. That is why gay men, and I include myself in this, are always vaguely unnerved by being the lone gay guy with a bunch of straight guys. Again, this is meant to express underlying subcurrents, not some supervening agenda. Keep that in mind. Gay guys are unnerved because we do not output that tiny positive electrical charge. To turn the metaphor on its head, we are more AC with each other than DC ... we play by flipping from positive to negative charge, pushing and pulling, alluring and demanding. So the electrical pressure of all those positive charges we experience around a bunch of straight guys is demanding.

It is in this sense that Albee's depiction of the confrontation between Peter and Jerry is so successful. He plays with what I would describe as the AC/DC thing ... alternately repelling each other and attracting each other. But each submission, each attraction makes the subsequent repulsion the stronger. At one point as the denouement approaches, Jerry starts to tickle Peter who laughs and enjoys himself. That rapidly devolves into a fight over territory that leads quickly to Peter picking up the knife that Jerry threw to him, and Jerry impaling himself on the knife as Peter holds it as warning that Jerry must not approach further. The knife which Jerry provided is like the penis which the sorority girl had demanded in Peter's previous encounter with the dangerous. But where his youthful danger was male/female, and ultimately resolved itself, his adult danger was male/male, and death was the result.

Albee's genius here is in the way he flips back and forth. Remember that the earlier part of Peter's life was written recently, where this terminal encounter was written 50 years ago. I wonder how long Albee has been thinking of the prequel.

So I have rambled on as is my wont. These are irresolvable questions, in constant flux. The names of the principles may be eternal, but the practice of them is always changing. Whenever you hear of an eternal principle, keep that in mind. The name may be eternal, but nothing human is eternal. Nothing is solid.

Photos by Arod from a lengthy series I call "Flat Faces" ... pix of men on billboards or posters out and about.

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Obama: You Lied To Gay People, and Now We Know For Sure

2009-06-12T19:17:00.000-07:00

You know the old saying: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more the change, the more the same thing.

I do not like that saying because it is more than pessimistic, it despairs. That this express some underlying truth ... that there is something grim and gloomy about human existence no matter the age or the conjuncture ... does not excuse its refusal to look at the dynamics of change.

But when one is confronted by the intolerable, the intolerable that has an ancient history, one is tempted to retreat into it ... Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

As I write, this, a commercial for EA Sports on the boob-tubery that uses Beethoven's Ode to Joy ... where are the ultra-expanded copyright laws when you need them. That's change you can believe in, albeit with cynicism ... change where everything, no matter how sublime, turns to crap soon enough.

Obama's turn to crap has been far too fast. His Department of Justice submission to a federal court in favor of DOMA yesterday is the last straw. It is an obscenity. They used all the most reactionary arguments against us ... comparing gay love to incest, squealing that it would cost money, refusing to acknowledge that the Loving decision that ended bans on interracial marriage has anything to do with the civil rights of the last minority that is officially, institutionally, and legally proscribed.

The Bush administration could not have been more vicious. So we are left with this: should we thank the bastards for smiling while they stab us in the back just because they are not the same old scowling bastards who knifed us in the stomach before.

Screw you, Obama. We are pissed right off.

There is rising rage in the gay community, and we are only two weeks from Gay Pride in San Francisco. We should change the slogan right now: Obama, Are You For Us or Against Us.

What a weasel ... more to the point, this is a naked betrayal. When he said that he was a "fierce" supporter of our rights, he lied.

For those of our brothers and sisters who gave him comfort when he appointed a virulent homophobe, the Warren bigot, to give his little prayer at that inauguration that I gushed over ... you were wrong, and we know that now. He appointed Warren because he does not give a flying fuck about gay rights. He used us and he dumped us. We should have protested loud and long on Inauguration Day, and I regret that we did not. He was winking then, but he is lying now.

The more I write, the more boiled I get.

We have to face it: on other fronts, Obama has been as flat as the vision of the earth of the Christians to whom he panders. We are no closer to closing Guantanamo, he seems like a muddle in the face the attacks on health care, there is no timetable in Iraq, new financial regulations are the stuff of fairy tales, and who has heard anything about climate change.

But absolutely nowhere has his failure to lead been more clear than in the case of gay rights.

We are pissed, Obama, and we blame it on you.

To my good friends who never took the koolaid, and who stuck with Hillary right to the end of that colossal primary season - you were right. He is a homophobe.

Or at least he is anti-gay. I promise to write on the distinction between homophobe and anti-gay shortly.

Tonight I am wondering how to express my rage on Gay Day.

What a weasel ... no offense to weasels who at least do not lie about who they are or what they do.

Photos by Arod: the first one is a woodshed which is where Obama and his tawdry advisers belong; the second is my Lesser Siren ... I don't have a picture of a weasel. BTW, AmericaBlog has had excellent coverage on all of this.

Twittering the Drupallers

2009-06-09T19:46:00.000-07:00

I spent all day Saturday at BADCamp ... the bay Area Drupallers periodic big meeting of code. I am not actually a techie, I just play one on TV. They held an all-day introduction to Drupal about half of which I already knew, half of which was indeed new, and half of which was seemingly pointless credentialing. That's three halves, but then again it was a long day. Enjoyable, but long.

When techies get together, the two biggest issues are power outlets and wifi. My colleague Eric arrived with a backload of video and audio recording equipment which he proceeded to set up very professionally ... I should know because I was married for a decade to my sainted ex who is a lighting and video pro. More importantly, Eric arrived with a massive power bar which made him instantly popular. I will never go to a conference again without a power bar. I want to be popular too.

As for the wifi ... well, the SFSU MBA program where the event was held had a very efficient wifi situation, and all was peaceful in the kingdom of geeks.

Good thing there was wifi because four long sessions had their slow moments. The first session was a little unorganized, and that led to peppered questions from those in the audience impatient for the truth. Any good presenter knows that every audience is littered with those whose greatest enjoyment is hearing themselves interrupt the good flow of information. The second and third sessions were excellent and informative, but the fourth and final session concerned matters not relevant to my own need to master this medium.

So I slid into Twitter world. When you are in a room full of geeks, replete with power bars and wifi, you are never more than a micro-second from the new universe of social media. And I have begun to Twitter.

On one hand, Twitter is a wonderful and rather enigmatic aggregator of links to information. I have three accounts, one associated roughly with this blog, another associated with work, and a third rather more unfocused one that follows feeds as my fancy strikes. I don't really look at the third one very often, but the other two are constant friends. You have to garden and prune your Twitter feed both actively and passively if you want to get the most out of it. On the professional level, I am looking for resources, contacts, and perspectives. So I am pretty brutal about who I follow.

But my personal Twitter feed, arodsf, is for the more expansive purpose of being involved in the galaxy of social media, so I can be free and fanciful. In the fourth Drupal session, I started checking out the #FollowFriday tweets. FollowFriday is a convention whereby people advertise Twitter feeds that they like or find useful. You can click on the feeds and find people you want to follow. I read the bio and check the most recent tweets. Two much mindless nonsense about shoes or where you are having lunch, and I ignore it. But some pith and some references get me to follow.

And so I found @arjunbasu. And he changed my whole approach to Twitter. He writes Twisters, 140 character short stories. And he does it really well.

The water tasted bad. He was thirsty but not desperate. So he opened the drawer and found his emergency flask and began the day with bourbon

And the car came straight at them, pulled in by their gravity, and in the moment before it hit, he thought of all the porn on his computer..

I couldn't wait to get home and start writing a few myself. It is harder than you think, but I just relaxed and let it come.

Tweeting on the front steps when the neighbor walked by and glanced. A little smile. They still ignore each other at the bus stop.

That was the first one. I stick to 130 characters so that anyone can retweet them and not cut off the end. The following was the first one I really like:

Two men at the intersection, one facing west, the other south. They see the flash and start. One reaches the far side, looks back.

I think these Twisters are essentially syllogisms, and occasionally enthymemes. There are two premises, though one can be unspoken, and then there is a conclusion. The success is in invoking an unexpressed emotion, or a doubt as to meaning or import and consequence. They can express an unformed bitterness ...

He lay awake night after night trying to figure it out. His lover slept through it all. They kissed in the morning, left for work.

... or the banality of everyday life ...

The soup was cold on delivery. The waiter said they do not have a microwave. He left a short tip but returned a week later anyway.

... or a vague and unexplored sexiness ...

Toto's Africa plays as he coffees, watches the waiter. Later, they cross paths at the opening, agree that they like ephemera best.

ArjunBasu gets downright sexual from time to time. I may go there sooner or later. But what I really want to do is play with history. So this one I have not yet tweeted, but I am actually proud of it:

Antoinette mounted the scaffold with scorn. My head in a basket is finer than all of you. She sighed at the basket's coarse weave.

After the final session at BADCamp, I went down to the food court with the other attendees on the promise of free booze from Sun Microsystems. But I had to wait too long and grew impatient. I wanted to get home and start writing my Twisters. I think I have found a new hobby.

Is that the waiter? Heads turned without a moment's pause in the conversation. No, not the waiter. What are we still doing here?

Photo by Arod, from a storefront on Haight Street. Twisters by @arodsf except for the first two by @arjunbasu.

Death Throes of the Gourami

2009-06-06T19:32:00.000-07:00

I live with a bunch of animals. One dog, Loki, and a bunch of fish and amphibians. Many fewer than in years past, but still there are a lot more frogs and salamanders in this house than most people have.

The last few days have seen the slow demise of a very old gold gourami. It is the last of three that I got over five years ago ... I never keep any records of my critters, so I am never quite certain how old they are. I thought I had two females and a male, which works out much better than two males and female. But sexing gouramis, especially young ones, is a bit of an art. I think we made a mistake, because one of the three rapidly declined under pretty steady assault by the one that is now in its death throes. Once the third one was gone the remaining pair quickly mated and produced three or four crops of fry. I took those that I could net to my vendor, a fine Burmese/Chinese couple who have a hole in the wall place off Polk Street that is a temple of the aquarium arts. It's called Ocean Aquarium, and any aquarist in San Francisco would be well-advised to check them out. Tell them Stephen sent you.

I don't really care to breed fish, and I was happy to know that some of the fry made it to adulthood. But the effort appeared to exhaust the female, and she only lasted a few years. I figured the other guy would soon follow, but he has hung on for years and years. Now he is at the end. I want him to die soon; I do have a method for euthanizing fish when it is necessary, which is when their incurable disease could harm others in the tank ... I put them in a container of their own water in the freezer and let them slowly fade away. But how can I take this creature from the home it has graced for so long and make its last few moments on earth a trauma. I know, it's only a fish. But it has been a sweet presence in my life. It has been looking at me every day for many years in the vestibule as I arrive and as I leave.

I started keeping fish and 'phibs in the late 80s. I love being around animals ... I would have many more if I could. I do not have cats because I am allergic, and that is a big bummer. I started keeping fish and amphibians under the influence of my great friend Kurt who died on May 10, 1992. I remember the date of his death by looking at the first page of any of the books he willed me because I marked each one with that day. To check again today ... I always forget the day ... I pulled Marvels of Insect Life, edited by Edward Step, F.L.S., with no publication date, but with a signature on the front page "Ethel Eaton, December 1945." The book is a treasure.

I revel in the old. I love living surrounded by thousands of volumes of books, many of them old and cranky, not used as much as they might prefer, but waiting for the moment when they are cracked anew. I am their guardian, ensuring that when I, like the gourami, pass on, they will be ready for another stage in their longer than my life. Book should outlive us, just as we should outlive our animals.

Yes, this is maudlin. But I have a pass on indulging my inner-maudlin. I am at the end of the first day of a three-day weekend, one in a series designed to slake some of the tension of the upcoming two and a half months of stress in my job, notwithstanding that I spent this first day off at an all-day Drupal training session. I have three major web sites to go live between now and September 1. The first two will be a new course and class search site and the course catalog for which MRU the major research university where I stack shekels in aid of higher education and my own sustenance; the last of the three will be a new Drupal-powered replacement for the Registrar's site for which I am webmaster. I have worked my whole life to hard deadlines, and I do enjoy the electric stress more than is healthy. But facing the looming period of madness ... I pause.

The big boss, whom I admire, set up a little half hour meeting with me for Tuesday. I asked him what it would be about. He said with a laugh he did not want to tell me because it might give me a heart attack. Now I write this knowing that he might, or at least could, read my blog. I do not think that he does read my blog, not because he is uninterested, but because I keep him apprised in person of my latest speculations on history and happenstance and the ludicrousness of life. But if you do read this, dear T, remember that I say it fondly and drolly. It did give me a heart attack. I truly, honestly hope that the announcement is more work ... I can always handle more work and more responsibility. What I dread is the notion that I might be reconfigured to somewhere less felicitous. Given all the water under the bridge, and my assessment of the situation, I have come to the conclusion that the announcement will be more work, of a very specific sort which it would pointless to adumbrate here. If so, I am ecstatic, because the key to mastering work is to know how to take on more work and make it work. I am game for that.

Aside ... I always misuse the word "adumbrate" but this time I do not care. I am not even going to look it up as I do 4 or 5 times a year.

So this is the three-day weekend so far ... dying gourami, day-long session at a Drupal conference in downtown San Francisco, wondering what it is that the big boss thinks would give me a heart attack. And a re-encounter with the Marvels of Insect Life.

I could ramble on, and I intended to do just that. But this is surely enough.

For those of my dear friends who keep accounts, this is the Friday post; I owe you a Sunday post, and I will repay your diligence with yet another excursus into old Sumer. Given that I have Monday off, and that I am late with the Friday post, the Sunday post may not happen until Monday. I checked with my internal oversight committee and got an okay. FWIW, we have no Internet in the house, so that explains my lateness on the Friday post. I finally managed to connect up via an unprotected WIFI from next door ... but I do not want them to know about it since their inattention has saved me more than once from the horror of being offline.

Photos by Arod of my sweet friend, Loki. I do not have the heart for photos of the dying gourami.

The Ancients Whisper: Heroes, and Clay and Silicon

2009-06-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

So I promise to end up at some point with the Internet. In my professional web 2.0 cruising ... or social media work as the Tweeters would have it ... I learn that mblog will be more popular if I use buzz words like Twitter and Internet and Flip camera. But I keep thinking about the men who for three thousand years made wedge marks in clay in what we call the Near East.

I've finished the rather quirky History Begins at Sumer by the quirky scholar Samuel Noah Kramer ... I say quirky because his fastidious self-credentialing becomes almost comic after a while. Kramer is the paragon of dedication to his arcane but essential specialty, and he is the sort of scholar that I admire without reservation. But he must have been quite a crazy guy.

All that said, I cannot agree with his take on heroes and heroic ages. Kramer delineates three accepted heroic ages ... the Homeric, the Indian, and the Teutonic ... and then argues that Gilgamesh and Enmerkar and Lugalbanda are a fourth and the earliest heroic age. Kramer posits a number of common elements in heroic ages ... a concern for individual heroes, and the tendency of the poets who celebrate the heroes to embellish the historical with the mythical. It is here that Kramer brushes against the truth of the heroic, but marches on. For the heroic ages are not in the eye of history but in the eye of the writer.

What is so amazing about re-reading ancient history at this point in my life is the degree to which all my thinking focuses on the scribes. Since I last read The Epic of Gilgamesh as a 30-something freshman at Cal in the mid-80s, I have written a doctoral dissertation that attempted to extract the consciousness of the writer from 15th-century Malay manuscripts which obscured as a matter of course the hands that created them.

So too with the clay tablets, the thousands upon thousands of them, which inform us of the life and times of some portion of life in the millennia before the Greeks transformed writing once again. We have to remember a few things about these writers. To begin with, we remember them, while we do not remember the story-tellers and neighborhood wags who have been the purveyors of traditions and knowledge in societies around the globe since before Sumer and into our own times. We also have to remember that the scribes were not a flat class of equals, but that they must have embodied hierarchy and structure in parallel with the society that they both served and created. In a chirographic society (that is, a society in which the most people both high and low were not literate, but in which literacy was the craft of a caste of trained specialists), writing was a precious object, indeed a fetish object, the possession of which marked power and charisma. So the scribes, both high and low, were in contact with power even if they did not hold it. And they no doubt sought to influence power, both secular and religious, sometimes at risk to their own safety.

Kramer makes the mistake of failing to understand that the "minstrels" and the scribes co-existed, and that they had a reflexive relationship, albeit one which we can only infer given that the sources we have are almost exclusively in the form of cuneiform. So when we think of the first great epic, that of Gilgamesh, we have to assume that there were popular versions, recited by bards in fire-lit villages far from the hubbub and glamor of urban Uruk. But those bards were influenced by the existence of writing. And I would aver that the chief influence is to focus the mind on the question of supervening authority.

Everyone enjoys a good yarn. And good yarns come with a moral, more often than not. The moral tells you something not just about how you should act but more so about the structure and meaning of the society in which you live. When I read Gilgamesh ... and remember that the main source for the popular version that most of us read is a Babylonian interpretation that largely but not exactly mirrors the Sumerian version that predated it by a millennium of more ... when I read Gilgamesh, I see the construction of a worldview that is deeply pessimistic, but that still posits the necessity of a king who is in contact with the divine. The Gilgamesh epic is thrilling, certainly. It is dramatic, and it seemingly contravenes expectation. But this is what modern people miss when we read the highly redacted version that most of us experience: no one who heard this text 3,000 years ago would doubt its authenticity. What they would feel from it is a re-affirmation of the real, not only the visible, but the ethereal which envelopes and contains and determines everyday life.

So I come back to this dialectic that bothers me all the time ... authority versus authenticity. We moderns are bedeviled by our legitimate concern with authenticity. We want to know if the story is real, if the scribes got it right, if the tablets are whole, if the translation is valid. But we forget at our peril that the concern for the authentic was not primary in the minds of the ancients. They wanted to understand the basis for being, for society. That something was authentic was guaranteed by its being there ... that is what I mean by arguing the primacy of immediacy in the pre-modern mind. But did the thing that was there reveal something about the structure of reality? Was it authoritative?

That was the job of the scribe: he was charged to produce authoritative texts, and these primarily went into the collections of monarchs and temples where the act of possessing them conferred the authority of the text to the owner.

Writing is so different now. It is no longer the province of a caste of the highly trained. The Internet, paradoxically for a time in which television had been threatening to create the first post-literate society, has created the greatest explosion in widespread writing in the history of humanity. You do not need wet clay, or a lifetime of training, or a kiln. Anyone can write. When we think of the impact on social relations of a society of active writers, we should also think of the impact on ancient social relations of a society in which writing was the most specialized activity.

People loved then, and they love now. People ate and drank then and now. People lived and died just as we do. But it is not the commonalities that reveal. It is in difference that we find out who they were and who we were, even if it is arguable that we are more similar than different. And the differences in the meaning and role of writing are an excellent place to start.

Photo by Arod from the Louvre, generally believed to be a representation of Gilgamesh, but also called "The Hero Overpowering a Lion", Neo-Assyrian period, reign of Sargon II (721-705 BC)

The Ancients Whisper: Enlil and the Wind

2009-05-31T15:14:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Samuel Noah Kramer's History Begins at Sumer, published in 1956. My edition was the first Doubleday Anchor paperback published in 1959, sold for $1.95, and one of those classic old paperbacks that the bibliophile loves to fondle. Alas, like so many old paperbacks, the spine did break despite my best efforts. None of the folios have slipped out, though.

Preserving an old book is what Kramer did, of course, though his books were in the form of tens of thousand of broken clay tablets. Kramer does not lack for pride in his work, but he did put together many previously separated chunks of fable and myth. I am not sure what his reputation is now in the field; the Wikipedia article is certainly laudatory.

What I know about Sumerian religion entirely derives from Kramer, and something like six readings over the course of my life of the Babylonian epic about the Sumerian Gilgamesh; I am going to tackle that again once I am done with Kramer. So what I write here is pretty impressionistic, meant more to illustrate where my mind is going in trying to imagine for myself the nature of consciousness in the earliest civilization about which we have written evidence.

Written evidence, of course, is what defines civilization if only because we know a great deal of what we know from written evidence. Cuneiform was a remarkably long-lived and relatively stable form of writing; it was in active use for a longer period of time than the time that separates us from Homer! And, of course, because its medium was clay, we have an enormous resource of fragments and remnants.

I am interested in the scribes; I am always interested in the classes to which I might have belonged had I been born into another era. The earliest writings about Sumerian civilization in Uruk (in modern southern Iraq), the biblical Erech, include descriptions of the intense curriculum and strict corporal punishment provided to prospective scribes. The graduates stood to inherit high position in society, at the cusp between the religious establishment and the political power. Most of what they wrote was bureaucratic, and this provides us with a deep look into economics and social relationships at the dawn of history. But there is enough writing on myth and attitude to give us great insight into the mind.

Kramer points out that the Sumerians did not write what we might call meta-prose ... speculative supervening prose that situates and explains. I would say that this reflects what I called the immediacy of myth and speculation when I discussed Herodotus. The Sumerians were very good at lists, as were their inheritors, and those lists have provided not just enumerations and chronology but also great sources for translation and deciphering. Lists and the immediacy or unmediated quality of reflection are characteristic of chirographic society ... that is a society in which writing is produced by experts for consumption by a society which remains radically oral.

So in the case of the myths which Kramer outlines, we see the repetitive style and textual chunks typical of oral texts, but we see them in written form. By chunks, I refer to stock phrases ready at hand for an oral storyteller; the most famous is the Homeric "wine-dark sea". The storyteller has these elements, preformed with rhythms and measure appropriate to the genre, at ready hand so as to make easier the task of putting a story together in performance. BTW, Kramer makes an error typical of his era (see page 137) when he says that the scribes are the "heirs and descendants of the illiterate minstrels of much earlier days" ... first of all, I prefer "non-literate" rather than "illiterate" because you can only be illiterate in a society which is radically literate, in other words in a society in which the vast majority of people read and write. This was not the case in Sumer, or indeed in any society until much later. But more importantly, we can have little doubt that the "minstrels" were contemporaries of the scribes, as evidenced by the oral techniques with which they wrote, but also by induction since storytellers have been characteristic of all radically oral societies. The "minstrels" and the scribes lived in the same lifeworld and they had exchanges and interchanges which we can only imagine since they apparently are rarely if ever depicted in the sources.

So the scribal arts, notwithstanding the literate caste that produced them, reflect the oral society in which the life world is immediate and unmediated. The gods are viewed as ever present, constantly going about their work, and living their lives, but invisible to humankind except in the effects that they produce. The four major gods are An (heaven), Enlil (the air god), Enki (god of the abyss and wisdom, and the organizer god), and Ninhursag (the mother goddess). But there are also hundreds of gods in charge of more or less everything and anything. It becomes a rather impersonal system, one fitting for a people unprotected against ill-fortune and bad fate, so they developed a system of the personal god who could serve as an intermediary to petition for or act on behalf of the individual with the other gods who, seemingly, were unconcerned with the fate of one person or another.

It is noteworthy that in a thought system where there is no evident conceptual mediation (i.e., where cause and event and consequence are seen as immediate and connected and inseparable), a mechanical form of mediation is invented in the ethereal realm to represent the possibility that cause and effect can be split apart. Compare that to our personal god ... Jesus ... who mediates between the very distant, unerring, and unchanging god the father, but in doing that, he himself is distant, unerring, and unchanged despite his dabble in history 2,000 years ago. There is something deeply revealing about this structure of divine portrayal, and the evident necessity to invite a mechanical means in the form of the personal god of breaching the divide between the immortals and us.

The unchangeability that we project to the immanent but distant god, the Sumerians found in their everyday life. It was a lifeworld that appeared as stable and immutable, and change was something that had to be entreated. Kramer writes, "The main thesis of our poet [of the first version of the Job myth] is that in cases of adversity and suffering, no matter how seemingly unjustified, the victim has but one valid and effective recourse, and that is to glorify his god continually, and keep wailing and lamenting before him until he turns a favorable ear to his prayers." That god is the personal god of the individual supplicant who, by this means, had some recourse against the immediacy of fate ... but a recourse of little effect and much wailing and bemoaning.

Again, this is pretty broad speculation based on a limited set of facts known by the writer, but it is how I try to imagine consciousness when people are in possession of a different set of not only notions but also explanations and facts.

I think this idea also explains why Enlil appears over time to have displaced An, the heaven god, as the primary god. Again, for us, the primary god is always in heaven, and heaven which is above us, unknowable and unimaginable, unreachable except through death and redemption. For the muslims, it is a layered above, albeit rather fully explained in their much more mechanical textual approach to religion, but admission is at the behest of the god who is without intermediary.

But for the Sumerians, the action was not in heaven. Enki, the god of wisdom and organization, ran the world. But Enlil was the wind, the air ... that is, Enlil was what mediated between heaven and earth, what caused change, what brought good and evil, what moved. Enki established the rules of culture and living, and ultimately ordered people as they died and went to the underworld. But Enlil, the wind, was the great god, most in need of sacrifice and appeasement. He was the divine representation of mediation, and thus appeasing him was of central importance in undoing the terible effects of change upon a world where immediacy was the coin of the realm.

Again, this is a mechanical way of representing mediation in a world in which mediation was not the default position.

I hope that this is not too obscure ... and I really hope that it is not utterly wrong. I'll try to return to this when I have re-read Gilgamesh.

Photos by Arod of the sky. Top photo taken at MRU, the major research university where I hold out my hands expecting a rain of heavenly delights; second photo is of the hill in the park behind my house in San Francisco. the third is the sky reflected in a window which, as I recollect, is on Haight Street in San Francisco.

Shame Redux

2009-05-28T20:32:00.000-07:00

So sundry official gay organizations have their knickers in a knot because the Olson/Boies legal challenge to anti-gay marriage laws appears, in their august considerations, premature and incautious. Allow me to be blunt ... screw 'em. You guys blew it; you are the ones who put on the ridiculously weak campaign that lost us an election that we should have won. So your moral high dudgeon is pitiful. You pissed away the initiative, and everything that is going on is ahead of you.

I like the Olson/Boies challenge because it blasts the issue into a new zone. He who does not compete always loses. These guys stepped up and decided to compete. They represent two gay couples who have the right to sue in federal court for their rights. Did our fattened bureaucrats .... I mean the ones who lost the Prop 8 campaign ... did they take into account that Americans have the right to sue for their rights? Are they telling two couples that they should shut up?

Disgusting.

Whenever I hear people tell gay people that we should be cautious, that we should wait, that the time is not opportune, that gay people should shut up, it turns my stomach. The time was not opportune when I came out of the closet publicly and joined gay liberation as a 19-year-old in 1972. Everybody told me that. The time was not opportune when we won civil rights victories in the 70s, and then had to fight the vicious bigotry of Anita Bryant, who is the moral precursor of the pretend-to-be-nice fulminating, pustulant, hate-filled bigots who bankrolled the campaign against our rights last fall. The time was not opportune when Gavin Newsom supported us and raised the gay marriage issue to another level.

The time is never opportune for gay rights. But we have marched forward by ignoring the wagging fingers and knocking knees. Now the cowards are "our leaders". I say screw 'em. And I don't mean in that "nice, spanky way".

That major gay organizations discourage this bold step only proves how much they belong in the trash can of history.

Bravo to boldness. Bravo to the courageous couples who engaged Olson/Boies. Bravo to anyone who fights for our rights. Bravo to being open and out and forward and uncompromising.

Photo by Arod, recently, of the window of a muscle supplement store on Market a block and a half from Castro.

Shame

2009-05-27T20:05:00.001-07:00

So it's disgusting ... the wee 6 on the California Supreme Court could not bring themselves to understand that civil rights are not subject to a vote. There is much talk today that the decision is actually very narrow ... that it states that all rights of marriage are guaranteed to gays except that gay people cannot use the word "marriage." Some will say that that is an essential victory, and that the religious fanatics are left only with a word. One way (sorry, but I can't find the reference again) suggested that we should just take the word "mariage" ... one R, and cooler because it the French spelling.

All this is lovely, and everything, but it misses the point. The California supremes have made a classic "separate but equal" argument. And separate but equal is anathema not just to American law but more so to the concept of civil rights. It is not the place of judges to rule on theological questions, and the question of whether marriage is sacred or whether the Sodom myth actually has anything to say about homosexuality have no place in law or government. The issue is civil rights. No one is saying that religious bigots should be forced not to hate us. We are saying that this is about our civil rights.

The supremes did not see this. They cowered behind the idiotic argument that popular opinion defines civil rights.

I had a little excitement yesterday. I attended the largely student demonstration at MRU (the major research university that laid off my friend Kurt today), and marched with them as far the head of the circle on Palm Drive. They went on to a sit down in downtown Palo Alto, as I headed back to my duties. It was an exuberant, very lefto feeling event. Two professors whom I knew, and a few staffers. Perhaps a 100 or so people in total.

Later I had a silly exchange with some right winger on Twitter. Someone retweeted my tweet "It's a new Dred Scott decision - think how it will look in history - the 'justices' will be so ashamed". And then some evident right winger novelist wrote me to ask if I knew what the Dred Scott decision was. Of course, I do .. it was a decision that stated that a negro was not a person and therefore had not status to sue for his freedom. I think it is very a propos, but more importantly it is a decision that has come to define judicial cynicism. So a little later, this rightwinger tweeted "Yeah, imagine, they made a ruling based on the law and not on "empathy." Never would have expected it." So I replied to him "Dred Scott - 'a ruling based on the law and not on "empathy."'"

That's the way they are crowing ... they are seeing this as lawful, as opposed to empatheticc. They are wrong. This was a failure to see the larger principle of the law that all persons are equal. The decision substituted a specious and discredited theory that approximately similar accommodation is equality. That is bunk. One day the ludicrousness of this decision will earn the same derision we now shower on Dred Scott.

Another fascinating development ... Ted Olson and David Boies, opponents in the Supreme Court case of Bush v Gore, have joined forces to take gay marriage equality to the federal courts. This would have been unimaginable even a year or two ago. We have moved rapidly forward. But it is no time for complacency. Let us applaud and praise Olson and Boies. But let us also organize and prepare for the next battle against the bigots.

Photos by Arod of San Francisco art. Top photo a mural on Harrison (I think) around 20th; bottom photo is a sculpture on the Embarcadero at the foot of Market.

State of the Gay

2009-05-25T17:51:00.000-07:00

So, three items ... American Idol, the California Supreme Court Decision, and something called ADAP.

Kris, the sweet christian married boy from down Arkansas way beat the glam rocker Adam who is distinctly if not openly gay. The fundies had picked Danny as their candidate of choice, but he was second runner up.

It was not surprising, and I did call it. I think the thing is vastly more about middle-of-road-appeal than about gay/straight or christian/secular. Adam's followers were not doubt a hard core, and his every performance solidified us; but Kris won people over as he visibly grew and assumed the mantle of stardom. So when it came down to one on one, the normal boy spoke to more people. I figure it this way ... if Kris were a quietly gay Christian from the heartland, and Adam were a loud booze and chicks rock star, Kris would still have won.

On the finale, there was a genuine affection between the two, and the LA Times published an article on the day of the final competition that argued that their relationship was emblematic of the rapprochement that is sweeping not just secular society but young christians as well. Ann Powers, pop music critic, wrote:

In this complicated climate, one painted thumbnail means a lot. Allen began decorating one of his black -- one of Lambert's favorite colors -- late in the season, apparently to dispel rumors that the pair, who were roommates in the show-sponsored mansion where the finalists reside, were feuding. Lambert reportedly later removed the paint from one of his thumbs in his own gesture of support.

The friendship between the two finalists suggests that tolerance can trump ideology, a powerful sentiment that echoes President Obama's suggestion that bridging differences could be more effective than trying to eradicate them.

I didn't know about the painted thumbnails thing ... I find it quite touching. It certainly is the sort of thing that one wants to be emblematic of "tolerance trumping ideology". But it is nothing to hang your hat on. Being nice, being nice and touching, only goes so far. Gay people know all about that.

So the wave of support for gay marriage in recent weeks and months has softened even the hard edges of a skeptic such as myself. There is a cascade of growing understanding that the arguments of the bigots make no sense, that there is no good reason why people should not marry whomever they choose, that the religious right has lied itself into a frenzy. It is not that people are suddenly righteous gay libbers ... it is, rather, a more American phenomenon, to whit that people figure they should stay out of other people's business and let them do what they want.

I still hold out hope that the California Supreme Court, by that original 4-3 majority, will understand that tossing out Prop 8 will spare the state from two more years of religious invective. The way it would work is that the right wingers would have to get 2/3 majorities in both legislative houses ... just like in Massachusetts. And the result would be the same as in Massachusetts, that the whole matter would rapidly become a non-issue.

Did the Supremes watch American Idol? Did they pay any attention to Iowa? Do they think that tolerance should trump ideology? Or are they thinking career? Are they thinking that the wingnut maniacs will never forgive them for voting for us? This, again and once again, points out the degree to which the bloody rump on the 'publicans is still driving the debate in America, still in the intellectual drivers seat, notwithstanding the now openly derided idiocy of their stance.

So here we are in this state of the gay waiting on a bunch of potential vacillators to see if we spend two more years, maybe four more years, proving that we are fundamentally human. I have been gay all my life, but the gnawing feeling of being publicly declared as less than human, it never gets less acute.

I think we are going to win tomorrow ... I was right about Kris, and I'm going to be right about this. If I am not right, then I am gonna be royally pissed. I think hundreds of millions will be royally pissed.

Civil rights is what it has always been about. But that is not all that is at stake in the current decline and fall of California. I could not summarize better the parlous state in which we find ourselves than did Paul Krugman yesterday in the New York Times. It's not state of the gay for him, it's State of Paralysis. And the entire crushing problem in what would be one of the richest countries in the world is the result of the deliberate strategy of the 'publicans to destroy the ability of government to govern. It is nihilism, just as their strategy against gay marriage is nihilism.

Nihilism ... it used to be groovy when we were hippies reading Dostoyevsky ... kills. And that is what the State of Paralysis plans to do as it threatens the Aids Drug Assistance Program (ADAP). Now, they plan to kill funds for children's healthcare as well, so we can't say they favor the cute babies over the fags. But what is a government that lets its people die for want of charity? Is that what Jesus would do?

Here is s case where it is pretty difficult to argue that tolerance is trumping ideology. The wingnuts would have a hard time to argue that if Jesus rather than the terminator had chased Gray Davis out of office, he would be in favor of killing babies and fags. But the scorched earth policy of denying everything leads precisely to that ... hatred, death.

I am aall for the painted thumbnails mode of expressing solidarity. But it is not going to save us. We need a bold Supreme Court, and we need a real government.

If you want to protest the possible end of the ADAP program, sign the petition at the SF AIDS Foundation.

Photos by Arod. Top two are from the tube; third photo is of Castro and market Streets, and the bottom photo is a detail from the mural on the Franklin Street side of the War Memorial Opera House.

Those of my good friends who still soldier through these ramblings may note that I did not meet my self-imposed Sunday deadline for a new post. So here is a codicil to my thrice weekly writing commitment ... on long weekends, I get until Monday to do the Sunday post.

The Ancients Whisper

2009-05-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

So, to set the scene ... and with no reference to the title of this post which, evidently like all my titles, breaks evolving rules of social media ... I took the day off to make a four-day weekend, cleaned two aquaria, ran around town and faced down the mad weekday traffic of downtown San Francisco in order to do my duty by recycling a bunch of old computer stuff. Now I am chilling with a beer that descibes itself as a "Handcrafted Ancient Ale". This would be a Midas Touch by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery who write this about the brew: "This recipe is the actual oldest-known fermented beverage in the world! It is an ancient Turkish recipe using the original ingredients from the 2700 year old drinking vessels discovered in the tomb of King Midas. Somewhere between wine & mead; this smooth, sweet, yet dry ale will please the Chardonnay of beer drinker alike."

I picked the beer because I am re-reading ancient history. The regular reader of this scratch will note that my reading habits are a never ending peregrination through history, period by period as the mood strikes me. What I want to focus on, in reading ancient history for the first time in 25 years, is the mind of the ancient world ... how did people construct reality, what were the signposts of the mind, what assumptions of system and configuration informed perception and action?

One has to beware of this sort of thing because the tendency is to look for commonalities. That is what I like to call the tyranny of relevance ... what can I find in the mind of Sargon that is like me. No doubt that sort of thought is comforting, but making the assumption that relevance and an unrequited empathy is the purpose of the study of history predisposes us to project our own being backward. That would be at best idealism and at worst an underhanded teleology. In other words, the approach that starts and ends with commonalities across the millennia either postulates some prior universal humanity, which would be a religious concept, or it assumes that history is the process whereby the present drags the past behind it.

I am human, of course, and I want to know what it would be like to be in Uruk in the third millennium before the myth of the cross ... I want to know how those people are just like me. But that is a projection; it has to be balanced with an understanding of how they differ.

So, from reading the magnificent Landmark Herodotus ... there are two themes that I found constantly in Herodotus.

Firstly, at least in the written word, there is a familiarity with the immediacy of death that we have lost in the modern Western world. That is a subset of the immediacy of culture and habit and action. Herodotus explains things very plainly and forwardly, even when he speculates about underlying causation. He is plain with his audience as if they are at his side. This is partly explained by his writing for a world which was still radically aural ... aural is in the hearing side of a radically oral society. This was a world where, notwithstanding writing, people knew things by reason of their having heard them ... and speaking and hearing were formalized in a way that we have lost. Now, we lost that way only recently, and there are still many places where that way has not been lost, or at least not fully lost. But in a radically oral society, and especially in a radically oral society before the invention of a radically literate society, people thought differently than we do.

That difference ... and I reference my dissertation on this ... is the difference between the primacy of authority over authenticity. In the ancient world, authority spoke, and authority guaranteed authenticity; we, by contrast, are obsessed by the authentic, and afraid lest we have been conned into accepting something inauthentic. In that sense, for us, authority exists primarily to guarantee authenticity. Herodotus never thinks of the authentic ... notwithstanding that he often does not believe things he has been told. He wonders about the veracity of who told him about things, and he posits veracity based on that. There is a religious dimension to this. You never read him saying that some passage is the inerrant, uncreated, permanent word of god ... in other words authentic by reason of the text being authoritative. Rather, you read him speaking about the authority of various interpretations of oracles. It is curious in this world where science and religion were genuinely inseparable that the divine was revealed not through inerrancy but through interpretation.

So the immediacy about which I started this section is an immediacy of speech and person and authority. And that dovetails with a world view that is immediate. I noticed how flatly Herodotus explains culture ... this or that is the habit of such a people. He does not layer his explanation with any ideology of acceptance or non-acceptance. Difference inheres in peoples and locations, and that is the way the world is. We do not see universals in Herodotus. We see a wide-eyed explanation ... albeit with plenty of sly self-credentialing ... where he postulates an audience that will accept his revelation as true because he is an authority. Immediacy, authority, interpretation.

Note how that differs from the Christian world with its distant god ... a world of mediation, authenticity, and, paradoxically, inerrancy. So ... and I slide into the tyranny of relevance here ... there is an argument that in some ways liberals and our love of ambivalence share at least the notion of interpretation with Herodotus where modern christians share virtually nothing.

So, on to the second theme ... reciprocity, or balance. Not balance in the sense of equality, but reciprocity in the sense of the action assuming or predicating or predicting the unavoidable countervailing counteraction that will balance the scales. For example, pride always calls out a comeuppance. The gods are the agents of this phenomenon, but they as much as we are bound to it. Reciprocity, in that sense, is a characteristic of reality, an ether in which we live. It is inescapable in Herodotus. It can be complex, and sometimes the reciprocity is paid by subsequent generations ... that, of course, is another part of the ancient mind, the corporate nature of the individual's being. And again, that is something that has not disappeared in much of the world. But I would aver that these notions were unquestioned in the ancient world where even in a place like Diyala province in present-day Iraq, people are aware of the antithesis to their corporate notion of personality ... that's why they hate us.

Reciprocity in Herodotus exists on the grand scale ... the Athenians helped the Ionians to revolt against the Persians, and the Persians burned Athens to the ground. But the Persians profaned various temples, so they lost at Salamis and Plataea. Herodotus explains all of this, as above, flatly and plainly, if artfully. He explains it as my grandfather explained the birds and animals, and the way that you do things. He explains it as if it is plainly real, true because it is, not because it is authentic.

So immediacy and reciprocity. Not that those are exclusive to the ancients. I have to find a way to express what was different about the ancients, and those are starting points. That's why I read history. I have finished Herodotus ... I thought him an excellent way to start thinking about the ancient mind. Now I am reading the history of the ancient Near East. Let me say only this about that ... the time from the first writing that we have from Uruk until Alexander defeated the Persians is longer than the time that separates us right now from Homer. Pause, my friend, for a moment, and think about that.

In the meanwhile, I have finished the second of my ancient Turkish beers. It is full and honeyed and grained. I know it is ancient because the label assures me of its authenticity ... and that is a relief since I paid $13 for four of them. Authentic ancient beer in a modern bottle. The authority is a web site put up by the makers ... and that I distrust. Hmmm.

Photos by Arod of statues at Sans Souci, Great Frederick's palace in Potsdam, Germany.

American Idol Performance

2009-05-19T20:01:00.000-07:00

I guess I will blog this live ... at least a little. I'll take some TV pix and upload them sooner or later.

What the hell is a "guy-liner"? ... says Ryan with reference to Adam.

Adam 1: Mad World ... seemed too cool, no climax. Not sure why he picked that song. I think he has to play all the different chords. This was laid back and not the high vamp thing we have seen too much of lately. Maybe that is the strategy. Very nice, but I didn't think it was a blow-away.

Kris 1: Ain't No Sunshine ... not as good as the first time he sang it. Lacked a bit of edge, and maybe a little overthought. But a sterling performance, with full and rich voice. I love that song, and I love the way he does it.

First round is a tie.

Adam 2: Change Is Gonna Come ... big, over the top. Bluesy and hard rock. This is what he does, and what he blasts out of the park. Wow! Took a classic and made it something utterly new. And, yes, the emotion was raw and gutsy.

Kris 2: What's Going On ... Sweet voice, but it seems like he doesn't know what the song means. Still, rocking performance. I just love the richness of his voice. But, the performance betrayed a lack of depth. Sweet, not deep.

Round two to Adam.

Adam 3: Horrid song, by Kara et al ... not really designed for Adam, but he made what he could out of it. It might seem to be his genre because it is so over the top. But he actually can wrap himself around a good song, and this song had too many elbows for wrapping. Not his choice, but he did as best he could. Impressive, not a home run. Christ, he's wearing a crucifix!

Kris 3: Sam song as Adam ... No Boundaries. Wow, he had trouble with that. Just a crappy song. What a way to pull the air out of the tire. I thought he was pitchy and all over the map. Never quite figured it out. Way to high for his rich lower tones.

Round 3 to Adam.

So I think Adam won the night. But I figure that Kris will win the competition; he is just better designed for the broad middle. NO doubt though that Adam outsang Kris tonight and he deserves the prize.

Kris 3:

Boleros

2009-05-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

The play is called Boleros for the Disenchanted but I am not sure that I get it. I'm not sure who is disenchanted in this play by José Rivera, performed before my crying eyes at the American Conservatory Theater. By crying, I mean a little weepy as the thing proceeded.

The play has two acts, the first set in 1953 when the protagonists, not so loosely based upon the playwright's biological parents, met and married in Puerto Rico, and then in 1992 when they are aged and one dying in Alabama where, so it seems, a long road just ran out. The first act was sharply written, and it made the writer's point that love and happenstance and perseverance in the service of ideals can find fruition. The second act was probably a smidge overlong and indulgent, but it too made the writer's point that love and happenstance and perseverance in the service of ideals cannot protect us from pain and decline and death. I should note that, as usual, the ACT set people outdid themselves, especially in the first act where the environment of the village was indicated by a series of hanging models of tiny houses, and the simplicity of life is indicated by the porch of a small house occupied by a bitter anti-American old man and his long-suffering wife.

The play was thankfully free of the butter-not-melting-in-the-mouth ethnic purism that infects so many pieces like this. It was a piece about people struggling to be and succeed in a world pitted against them. Their ethnicity was a fact but not the moral center of the story. I am sensitive to that because there are aspects of my parents' lives that mirror what Rivera portrayed of his parents. My parents are not possessed of the retreat into ethnic identity to which so many so cloyingly cling in this era where the essential readily trumps the substantial. Rivera avoided the trap, and it made his piece more universal, more visceral.

It made me think of my own parents, and it touched me. It does not matter that this was not a play in the tradition of magical realism, because it simple reality and its unaffected dialogue left me unarmed in front of knowing what I know about how life turns out.

The first act was in 1953 ... that's when I was born ...

Not exactly certain when mother and father met, but they lived only a few doors apart during their teenage years, and they married in 1951. Dad was more adventurous than Mom in youth, but he soon founded a business and a family. Notwithstanding all the dross of everyday life, what my parents had in spades was ethics and honesty and a commitment to doing what is right.

So this is not meant to be a long rumination on what my parents went through, or how they sacrificed to bring us up. It is meant only to say that what Rivera wrote in the first act, notwithstanding how far away it was from my parents encountered at roughly the same time, spoke to me about what they experienced when they met and married.

And so cut to the present. Dad has had a stroke, mother cares for him, and all the dross of the past dissolves in the face of their irreducible commitment to each other. I could think it is sad, but life is not a circle but an arc, and eventually the arc comes to ground again. Like Rivera's parents, my parents have lived the arc, and now it approaches ground again. What marks them as honest people is not just that they are together, but that the fullness of the bond between them exhibits in its every moment the fullness of the lives they have lived.

So, Mr. Rivera succeeded. He set out to display the meaning of an old relationship, and he made me think of the best old relationship I have ever witnessed. So, to return to where we started, I am not really sure where we find the disenchanted referenced in his title. Because staring the fullness of reality in the face is not disenchantment ... it is the stuff of living itself.

Photos by Arod of my parents. The two sketches are of mother and father and they have long been on the walls of the various places they have lived; bottom photo taken at a family event about a year ago.

Eurovision

2009-05-17T10:22:00.000-07:00

Somehow I missed the whole Eurovision thing ... not a bad move given the paucity of time. But for pure schmaltzy pop with that soupçon of fagginess that marks its as no-doubt European, who can top the cutest guy in the world with a violin, Alexander Rybak.

What a babe!

The event was in Moscow, and the grey and grisly Russian state could not restrain its medieval bloodlust even when the eyes of the world are on it. The thugs in uniform that are the Russian police violently broke up a gay demonstration.

It is noteworthy that Rybak condemned the Moscow police. He stated, "Why did they [the Moscow police] spend all their energy stopping gays in Moscow when the biggest gay parade was here [in Eurovision] tonight?"

Also, check out this documentary on being gay is Russia on Youtube

Most of the information in this post comes from the incomparable JoeMyGod blog. Must reading!

Obama, Adam, and a Bunch of Whores

2009-05-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

Obama

When I think of Obama right now, I keep thinking of torture and gays, and he is off course on both. We have high hopes yet, of course. If he does manage to get a health care proposal in front of Congress, and if there is some movement towards financial re-regulation, both within the next few months, well we can consider that movement. But right now Obama seems a little bamboozled.

The torture thing, like the economy and the various wars, are not his fault ... but they are his problems, and problems trump fault. The constant chatter on torture, likewise, is not something he can do anything about. Both the 'publicans and the new aggressive left talking heads can't get their minds off it. And this is a problem for the agenda.

Yes, torture is horrible, and ... surprise, surprise ... the dubyaites lied and fudged and used torture to try to extract "proof" that the tyrant Saddam was in bed with the puritan al-Qaidah. But what does banging that drum get us right now? What it does is to make Dick Cheney relevant. What it does is to keep Bush in the conversation. What it does is give various troglodyte 'publicans a platform to call Obama a traitor. And what it does not do is to reveal the opportunity to break out of the old politics into the new.

I saw a piece ... can't seem to locate it now, but will substitute this note for a link if I stumble on it again ... today which noted that Obama seems to have been bamboozled by his generals. I think that is true in regards to his failure to pull any significant units out of Iraq. But Obama has to refuse to release more photos of torture. There is no upside for him, he hardly needs in any real sense a further proof of the immorality and anti-democratic ... indeed anti-American ... nature of the Bush administration. And the release of those photos would only serve to infect his efforts to re-orient American foreign policy with the very poisons he seeks to supersede. I am certainly for transparency, and Obama came to office on a platform of transparency. But this is no win for him. Or for us. Revenge traps us in the past, no matter how well-deserved; I think it serves the 'publicans if only because it feeds their ability to obstruct and delay and get in the way.

Oberman ... Maddow ... move on. Leave dubya behind. What about the agenda for the future?

Now gay rights works the same way, only Obama is here the one who is hanging on to the past to no good effect. If he killed "don't ask, don't tell" today, the news cycle would be two weeks long, and then it would seem like it had never happened. Gibbs, press secretary, had this to say "'To get fundamental reform in this instance requires a legislative vehicle,' Gibbs said. 'The president made a promise to change the policy; he will work with the Joints Chief of Staff, the administration and with Congress to ensure that we have a policy that works for our national interests.'" To use a word, what a pile of horseshit. Have some chutzpah, Obama ... just do it.

But ... and this is getting to be an eerie refrain ... he doesn't just do it. I understand the cool, the need for timing. But the enemy ... I mean the 'publicans ... are on the run. Gay marriage is sweeping the country. We are still spending scarce federal dollars chasing Arabic speaking faggots out of the army.

Have some goddamm balls, Barack ... just end the stupid policy.

But "no" ... because we are still living in the era of dubya ... and the torture and the gay debates prove it.

When do we move on?

American Idol

I am glad that Gokey is gone. He bugged me. I never really liked his voice, and the performances seemed carbon copied to me. But I suppose I did let my bias interfere with my critical faculties to some degree. He's probably better than I think.

He double-bugged me when I got wind of the christian conspiracy to win him. Hardee har, they didn't win ... oops, that is not nice. Regardless, it says something about the curiosities of American Idol voting, but because they do not provide us with any demographic data, we can only speculate ... badly. I hope they re keeping this data somewhere, because some enterprising doctoral student should make a great dissertation out of it some day. The Twittersphere was alive with Christians promising to hang with Kris ... but that stinks a little given that, christian though he may be, they gave him no succor last week.

I thought Adam was predictable on Tuesday. Two hard, hard rock performances. I want the raw, shocking creativity of his "Ring of Fire" performance; I want him again to do something that we have never seen from anyone before. I think if he does that, the sheer velocity of his talent makes him the winner.

That of course relies upon a notion that there is a large portion of the voting audience who vote from the performance rather than the prejudice. And that is good.

I really like Kris Allen too ... although he should stick to a lower register. In the return to Arkansas piece, he sang a folk song and kept the voice down low ... it is so rich and sweet not like candy but like molasses. He will be a luxuriant, velvety balladeer, and I love that schmaltz.

So in a sense, it does not really matter who wins, except that I want the fag to win. When I scratch myself, more often than not, my predilections devolve to this ... if it's good for the fags, then it's good.

So Adam, blow us away. Make it a romp. We'll all groove to the puppy a-croonin', but we will suffer spine chills when you make music no one has imagined before.

Whores redux

So Craigslist caved, and killed their Erotic Services in favor of something called Adult Services. Pretty much the same thing, as far as I can tell, except nobody speaks the nasty words, there are no naked pictures, and ... curiously ... they no longer categorize by m4m or w4m. What's that about?

When will we realize that people have sex? When will we realize that all of the bad that comes with prostitution is made worse by illegality? When will we realize that a service like Craigslist would allow a rational approach to public health to monitor disease, offer services, and protect people. Oh well. More idiot madness in the service of foot-stomping politics. I guess Craigslist had to semi-fold. But what a waste that we spend public resources on trying to prevent people from consenting activities.

Photos by Arod of street art around Florida Street. I took these photos in 2005. The third photo, near Harrison and 15th, has a legend that states that it is "De Frontera a Frontera," by Joel Bergner, June 2003.