Why I won't be going to the October 11 March on Washington

Disappointed at President Obama's apparent failure to immediately fulfill many of his campaign promises in the sphere of LGBT rights, gay organizations have hastily coalesced around a new March on Washington for this October 11, 2009. The march is called "The March for Equality," and has been organized without the coalition-building and platform-exploration that marked the previous efforts. Although I proudly attended all of the previous national gay marches on Washington starting in 1979, I will not be attending this one.

Today, September 12, a right-wing white racist demonstration descended on Washington to express its opposition to President Obama. Below are three photos from this demonstration, which reportedly drew a hate-filled racist mob tens of thousands strong. In these photos, plain for all to see, are expressed shocking racism and ignorance, profound intolerance, and active calls for the violent overthrow of our first African-American president. I have neglected to post the photos that show signs saying things like "We came unarmed...this time" and "where's my gun."





The gay community has been drifting rightwards for some time. I don't know if it's the ill-advised campaign for marriage equality (which I support abstractly), or its surprising embrace of Hillary Clinton's more right-wing campaign during the democratic primary, but today's gay activists seem self-obsessed, narrow-minded, and strategically adrift.

I am disappointed that everything we hoped and prayed and voted for about Obama last year has come crashing into reality. The intensified war in Afghanistan, the difficulty of healthcare reform, economic recovery for the banks and corporations without recovery for regular people, and the failure of LGBT legislation to advance have all been wakeup calls about the strength of right-wing resistance to the will of the people expressed last November. In some of these spheres I disagree profoundly with Obama; but in others I cannot fault him.

The gay establishment has been quick to suggest Obama's failures on LGBT advancement are evidence of dishonesty and betrayal. Blogs have been filled with angry rants suggesting he is bigoted and beholden to right-wing Christians.

However, the summer of discontent over healthcare reform--frankly an issue I place in higher import over "DADT reform" (allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the armed forces--who the FUCK would want to do THAT!), ENDA (employment non-discimination), hate crimes legislation, or ending DOMA (the vile Defense of Marriage Act signed by Bill Clinton enshrining hatred of homosexuality into law)--has shown a massive not-yet-violent civil war waging in this country between the forces of white racist ignorance and right-wing reaction on one side, and the vast majority of regular people of all colors and sexual orientations on the other.

Now is not the time for the lesbian and gay community to take to the streets against Obama, effectively swelling the ranks of the wrong side of this social and cultural civil war. Although it might be argued that the demands of the October 11 march are not right-wing like the demands of this weekend's racist lynchmob dress rehearsal, I believe this distinction will be ultimately lost. I think it's also fairly guaranteed that the October 11 march will be overwhelmingly white, thus further edging the consciousness of a rightward drifting community away from what should be unifying themes of social justice.

After the tragic victory of Prop 8 in California, repealing marriage equality in that state, it was suggested that this defeat for gays was the "fault" of California's black population. While statistically later debunked, this notion has stuck in the white gay popular imagination. Obama's complex position at the time--clear opposition to Prop 8 combined with opposition to gay marriage in favor of full civil equality expressed as domestic partnerships--has confused gay activists.

Quite aside from these concerns I think this march is also not going to actually do any favors for its avowed agenda. I believe it was the last MOW I went to that was overwhelming dominated by the gay lobby group "Human Rights Campaign." The HRC is known for advocating for LGBT rights without ever using the words "gay" or "lesbian." NONE of their hundreds of thousands of placards for that last march mentioned our identity openly. HRC is assimiliationist in the worst way: seeing equality marked by the number of cocktail parties they're invited to. It is ironic that the people behind the current march initiated their plans with a posture of militancy and outrage. Now that their organization is under way, their sloganeering is equally timid and closeted, and their fundraising is marked by some peculiar efforts to stay within certain tax codes. While quite a few LGBT organizations have now issued paper endorsements of this October 11 MOW, I am not convinced that the force of the internets will be enough to replace the organizing efforts and grass-roots outreach that marked previous efforts. As a principal organizer of a failed potemkin-village mass demonstration for LGBT rights in 1984 (a story I will tell someday), I know that enthusiasm is not a replacement for organizing skill and vast numbers of ordinary people.

There are many battlefronts for gay activists: fighting marriage equality repeal attempts in the states where equality has been won, for example. At best the MOW is a diversion away from these, and at worst a massive misalignment of our community. I'm not suggesting that our community be silent about its own demands, but I am very clear that we must do so in manner with long-term strategic benefits.

If the Obama adminstration is defeated by the right-wing white mob with the assistance of the gay community, that mob will thank the gay community only briefly for its assistance before it offers us our own special kick to the curb.

Advice for President Obama on his healthcare speech

I love it.

Letter to the Whitehouse on healthcare

"Last year, in the only opinion poll that actually mattered, President Obama received the overwhelming mandate to reform our health care system. Many of us knew that compromises would have to be made; in my case I understand that a single-payer government health service like most of the world's progressive nations already have is not on the immediate agenda. But having made this compromise, it's important for our President and his administration to understand that this is the line drawn in the sand. The "public option" must not be abandoned. It represents our only hope to take a step toward justice for the un- and underinsured. Please don't take this crucial option off the table. It is vital to many--like me--who are marginally employed and frantic about our inadequate healthcare, at the mercy of rich insurance companies, rising payments, and rising costs.

The compromises have already been made--the Public Option MUST remain part of healthcare reform!"

Boy Crazy!

My pal Candy Samples is back with a new video and it's super hot! Jesse helped Candy and Allan write the song, and once again he and I are cast members. If you like the song, you can buy it on Amazon or iTunes!

There are some serious costume changes and the song is catchy as hell. Candy is now my favorite drag queen EVER.

News flash! MY Kenyan Birth certificate exposed!

Yes, I have been exposed as a Kenyan immigrant. Get your own fact-busting birth certificate, just like our Communist/Muslim president has, right here!

Victor Jara's Prayer

I found this translation of Victor Jara's "Plegaria a un Labrador"

Stand up, look at the mountains
Source of the wind, the sun, the water
You, who change the course of rivers,
Who, with the seed, sow the flight of your soul,
Stand up, look at your hands,
Give to your hand to your brother so you can grow.
We'll go together, united by blood,
Today is the day
We can make the future.
Deliver us from the master
who keeps us in misery.
The kingdom of justice and equality come.
Blow, like the wind blows
the wild flowers of the mountain pass.

Clean the barrel of my gun like fire
They will be done at last on earth
Give us your strength and courage to struggle.
Blow, like the wind blows
the wild flowers of the mountain pass

Clean the barrel of my gun like fire
Stand up, look at your hands,
Give to your hand to your brother so you can grow.
We'll go together, united by blood,
Now and in the hour of our death.
Amen. Amen. Amen.

Taken up by a younger generation!

Healthcare is a right

I'm amazed sometimes at the gulf between my own values and those of what seem to be a sizable portion of this country's population. Here we have yet another racist image being circulated among the Republican right-wing mob that neatly ties its ugly racist ignorance to the mind-bogglingly ignorant campaign against healthcare reform.

Why are these knuckle-dragging dolts so beholden to the existing healthcare system that makes the US a sicker, shorter-lived, and poorer nation than those with progressive national health services? Why are they so anxious to sacrifice their health and their money to an industry designed foremost not to provide affordable healthcare but TO MAKE A PROFIT FOR ITS SHAREHOLDERS?. It just doesn't add up.

Well this graphic provides vital insight into their real motives: we don't want nothing to do with that communist ni**er.

This country desperately needs national healthcare: not better insurance but better healthcare. Sadly, it looks like all we may get, if we're very very lucky, are a few regulations on the obscenity that is insurance.

RIP Michael Jackson.

My appreciation is here.


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update: I've cross-posted this article here from its original Ile Oxumare home.


"How Does It Feel? When You're Alone And Cold Inside"--MJ, Stranger in Moscow

I remember when I first heard the Jackson 5. It was back in Chicago in the late 1960s, and they were so joyously infectious, and little Michael was the same age as me! He became the background noise of my youth and young adulthood, ever present. Sure by the late seventies I was a nascent jazzhead, but who didn't like the Jacksons? "Blame It On The Boogie," "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough," I remember the excitement I'd feel if I was entering a club and heard those songs playing over the distant dancefloor.

After I moved to New York City there was "Human Nature" and the unbelieveable world-gripping love-affair with "Thriller" and his absolute mastery of the human body through dance. Yeah I listened to my jazz and I was getting into New Wave but who didn't like Michael Jackson? I listened to "Bad" and was amazed at the technology of his sound. The last Michael I bought was "HIStory" and oh my God there he is singing the word "SHIT!"

I'm not really one for Disney-esque gloss and by then, well everybody loves Michael Jackson, but I stopped being so interested in his music and the "King of Pop" hype machine being stacked around him like so much plastic, so I probably can't name a single one of his songs since then. But he was always there, in the background.

And now, shockingly, he isn't. He's gone!

There is of course, the other Michael Jackson story, the one that began somewhere between his driven, task-mastering parents and that love song to a rat. The other story is the one where the adorable black boy grows into a strange powder-white not-quite-a-man, his face carved into unnatural shapes, and his reputation stretching the limits of belief. The weird Peter Pan obsession, the ugly theme-park garden estate, the sleeping with children, the peculiar marriages and strangely named children, the weird public faux-pas like babies being dangled off balconies, and the face and hair every year seeming stranger and stranger. His voice always a boyishly innocent falsetto, his singing evolved into an odd ritual of yelps and whoops.

I remember in New York City somewhere around the time his friend Diana Ross was trying to ingratiate herself to the citizens of our city in the early 1980s and she gave those unforgettable storm- and mob-plagued Central Park concerts (both of which I attended), there was an ugly ugly headline on a local African-American newspaper: "THE WHITE LADY AND THE FAGGOT." The white lady of course was Diana Ross and MJ was "the faggot" and I have long since forgotten why this now-defunct newspaper hated them and their friendship so much but it must have been a lifetime of dealing with such harsh judgments that pushed MJ so deeply into a unbreachably private life.

I hope in some way that the strangeness of MJ's last two decades was its own kind of hype. Was he happier than he seemed? I hope his family loved him and treated him well behind the walls of public persona. Was his world the lonely hard-edged place that seems to dominate the lyrics of "HIStory" or was it something filled with the joy of love and creativity and artistry?

It's always sad to lose one's musical idols, and the cost of living to middle age as I have done is outliving many of those responsible for my own life's soundtrack. Of course the music these amazing people created stays alive and ever-present. But as much as I have wondered in disbelief what the hell he was up to, I never thought Michael Jackson wouldn't be there in the background.

Goodbye Michael! Thanks for your music. Peace and blessings to you and all of those who loved you.

Notes on opposition

Just a comment duped here, forworking into something. I'm frustrated as hell at the current trahectory of the gay community. It's a timeof such promise but it's being so seriously mislead. Anyway, from a comment I wrote on a blog:

You and many many other blog commenters with your same bullying tone and lack of substantial argument have in fact made numerous expressions of buyer's remorse for Obama and nostalgic note of your previous support of Hillary Clinton. I'm not inventing that.

I'm not actually negating any of the community's frustration, which is obvious. What I am negating is this hyped-up campaign of hyperbole, led by people who never actually supported Obama in the first place, for reasons that were as questionable then as they are now.

What I call upon the community to recognize is the dangerous trajectory that you Obama haters (and yes that's what you are "Michael") are playing with as you attempt to steer a frustrated community into open opposition to the Obama presidency.

Rachel Maddow may be enjoyable entertainment but the community led by a TV network's quest for ratings and popularity is one that will soon find itself floundering and leaderless. Rachel Maddow is not our community's leader, and nor should be the defeated Hillaryites who sensing blood in the water have come back to feed. They offer no real solution and their leadership will end in tragedy for our community as what POSES LIKE righteous opposition soon turns bitter into eventual rightward drift.

If you think I am making that up look at what has happened in many gay communities in Europe where squeaky clean and tidy Eurofascism has found acceptance among a privileged white layer that now includes some gays.

I'm frustrated with a lot of what Obama has done or not done. But the battlelines are clear for all to see, and I am not eager to stand with the wingnuts and American religious fascists who are mobilizing against not only the centrist Obama as he is, but the symbolic Obama we voted for with the (as yet) unfulfilled promises.

Which side are you on?

Jimmy Pinkpanther von Barc H., rip

I had to put one of my cats to sleep today. He was very sick. The end was peaceful; I thank God for caring professionals, to use a cliche. He was a difficult cat, always sickly, quite ill-mannered, semi-feral, and had a questionable grasp of potty-training, but he was a warm bed companion in winter, and very loyal to me for having rescued him from a shelter.

He is survived by his roommate Henry Skylark von Barc H., who didn't usually get along with him, and me, who is sad, but glad that he is no longer suffering or frightened.

G'night Jimmy.

Enhanced Contradiction

One nation has used nuclear weapons, incinerating thousands in the blink of an eye. And if it is Japan, Germany, and Russia who have the reputation for being the bad guys of the last century, going around and attacking other nations unprovoked and then brutally occupying them, one might want to maintain some perspective and remember who carpet bombed North Vietnam for much of the 1960s and 1970s, who invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, who invaded Grenada in 1983, and who invaded Iraq in 2003--all more or less if not unprovoked, unthreatened in any real way. And one might want to remember who was behind a multitude of coups and proxy wars in Guatemala in 1954 and the 1980s, Nicaragua in the 1980s, El Salvador in the 1980s, Cuba in 1961, Congo in the 1960s, Iran in 1953, Afghanistan in the 1980s.

What I grew up hearing called "Chinese water torture" (thanks to the Korean war) turns out to have its roots in the Spanish Inquisition, practice at the hands of Japanese militarism, and perfection with hoods and boards at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, is now called "water boarding" with its subtle suggestion of leisure-time recreation. And in the nation that most excels in double plus good euphemistical new-speak water-boarding turns out to be only one of the many prescribed practices of "enhanced interrogation" spelled out in recipe books issued by our former president George Bush's ironically-named justice department.

President Obama has, to his vast credit, opened some of the books on these deplorable inhumanities, shedding a little light on the Bush/Cheney doctrine of bureaucratic inhumanity that lead to our modern day gestapo-esque reality of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Baghram, and CIA black site prisons.

So now we all know, crimes were committed. What will we do about that? Well, apparently not very much, including not even clearly saying it won't happen again. Here's the rub. In his eternal optimism--and I don't actually mean that to sound so harsh--Obama knows that just under half the country doesn't have much of a problem with these crimes. It must be said that half the country doesn't seem to have much of a problem with the rest of us being enslaved to insurance companies, credit card companies, banks, soul-lessly greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, or religious fundamentalists either.

So how does the agenda of change which half the country DID vote for a few long months ago proceed? How now when the mildewing morality of a nation which claims to be free and progressive is revealed to be rotten with stinking and exposed corruption and hypocrisy is Obama to proceed?

President Obama is at one of many crossroads. He, who now controls the predator drones that kill innocent and guilty alike without trial or appeal, who now must choose secrecy or openness, who now holds the keys to the torture cells still stocked with people of unjudged innocence, who now claims to steer the ship of state, can choose not to fight this battle. Having defeated that other half of the country in his election he now hopes to unite us and heal us.

But what if it is not possible to heal that contradiction between the nation that murders at will (and the half of the population that unquestionably supported the actions of Bush and his predecessors in tradition) and the nation that claims to stand for a higher vision?

I want universal healthcare. I want marriage equality. I want economic justice. I want green energy. I want all the promises that Obama has made. But if all of these things are going to be battles, then let the battle be joined now over torture, where the morality is clear. If Obama is going to need more allies in the fight for a new more humane future, let him win them by repudiating completely the past and dismantling its machinery of murder. That intolerant, militaristic, backward, corrupt less-than-half of America is not monolithic. Let them be called out.

The United States has done terrible terrible things. They didn't start with Bush and they didn't end with him leaving office. We will win nothing if at every step we allow the forces of reaction to call the tune, to threaten, merely by their presence, to derail the cause of justice.

The previous administration must be held accountable, and responsible, for its crimes. Whether its judges or bureaucrats or interrogators or George Bush himself, the guilty must be punished. President Obama is wrong to reject that path.

What's wrong with this picture?

This is a photo of Lenora Fulani with NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, who was elected twice as a Republican, recently strongarmed democracy and bribed City Council into letting him run for a third term, against the term limits laws twice voted into law by New York voters. Lenora Fulani is a figure in the Independence Party. Since Bloomberg--at least until last week; apparently he will now ALSO be running as a Republican again--calls himself an Independent and "Independent" sounds like "Independence" and he thought that would be a nice way to appear on the ballot.

Bloomberg basicaly agreed to bankroll the Independence Party in return for their party line on the ballot. Nice deal, eh? But who is the Independence Party? Just a bunch of nice independents?

Um, not really.

The Independence Party is the latest incarnation in a mind-control cult half a step away from such outfits as Scientology and with traceable connections to Lyndon LaRouche. Formerly known by such entities as The New Alliance Party and the Institute for Social Therapy and Research, this shady outfit and personality cult for Fulani and founder Fred Newman, used to haunt the left and progressive movement trying to siphon off disaffected questioning individuals into its near brain-washing psychotherapy programs. They would urge troubled people to attend their therapy sessions with a doctrine saying that "the system" was responsible for people's depression or mental issues and that the solution to personal unhappiness or psychological issues was to join their group and fight capitalism.

Now, apparently capitalism is no longer the enemy. As the left and progressive movements faded, providing a lack of recruits for this cult, the Independence Party drifted rightward, toying with all sorts of unsavory right-wing characters. This unholy alliance between a would-be dictator and a power-hungry personality cult should be a major scandal in this city, but it is not. My question is:

WHY?

I moved to New York City in 1981. One of my closest friends was a man names Steve Rose. He had moved to NYC from upstate New York, become an RN, and joined the gay activist world with gusto. He joined GAA, the Gay Activists Alliance--in the late 1970s, and was part of the faction of GAA at its end who became sympathetic to the Revolutionary Socialist League, then one of the left groups most active in that pre-AIDS gay movement. Steve was not drawn to the left through intellectualism, through student disaffection at some ivory tower. He became a leftist because his heart told him it was the right thing to do. He chose the RSL because of its unique attempt to combine socialist orthodoxy with a left libertarian spirit and its complete embrace of the nascent GLBT movement.

Eventually as the RSL imploded in those dark Reagan years Steve and I had a falling out. We both moved on, and sadly, Steve joined those first ranks activists to be diagnosed with AIDS. His first over Alberto passed on first, and Steve himself lost his battle with injustice sometime in the mid to late 1980s. The last time I saw Steve was on a street corner. Although a few years before he made numerous sharp and stingingly incisive polemical attacks against the New Alliance Party and their ilk, by then he was defeated. Facing personal demoralization along with the challenges of fighting HIV Steve joined the NAP. When I saw him on that corner telling me of his new allegiance to NAP I saw such despair behind his eyes belying the wooden and rote recitation of how NAP had helped him to see that his problems were not his own, rather the burden of oppression and capitalism. It was heartbreaking to see him so broken, so surrendered to the easy answers of a cult that could do his thinking for him. I grieve that he spent his last years in such company. While brash and not always sympathetic, Steve was a fighter and a real hero of gay liberation. The cult that parasitically attached itself to him, joining the HIV in sucking out his life force, cannot now go unopposed.

Bloomberg's unholy alliance must be exposed, and Bloomberg's Giuliani-like power grab must be spiked.

update: check out Lyndon LaRouche Watch for a lot of details about the Fred Newman cults.

New York Post = Racism Unleashed

This speaks for itself. This paper's offices should be burned to the ground. This cartoonist is long known as a anti-gay bigot of the worst type. Now he turns his "humor" on President Obama. The editorial board of the paper has defended the racist caricaturist, Sean Delonas.

Finally

From President Obama:

In the last few days, we've seen proposals arise from some in Congress that you may not have read but you'd be very familiar with because you've been hearing them for the last 10 years, maybe longer. They're rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems; that government doesn't have a role to play; that half-measures and tinkering are somehow enough; that we can afford to ignore our most fundamental economic challenges -- the crushing cost of health care, the inadequate state of so many of our schools, our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.

So let me be clear: Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed. They've taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars, and they've brought our economy to a halt. And that's precisely what the election we just had was all about. The American people have rendered their judgment. And now is the time to move forward, not back. Now is the time for action.

Historic Inauguration; Clarence Thomas Sleeps

Thanks to this super cool inauguration photo you can see that conservative supreme court justice/sexual harasser/right-wing stooge Clarence Thomas thinks that the occasion is perfect for dozing off.

!

President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama! President Barack Hussein Obama!

still a little giddy.

A new step forward for civil rights

From the website of the President of the United States:

Support for the LGBT Community

"While we have come a long way since the Stonewall riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do. Too often, the issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It's about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect."

Check out whitehouse.gov, and welcome and thank you, President Barack Obama.

Progress

Tomorrow Barack Hussein Obama will be inaugurated as president of the United States of America.

There will be a time to hold him to the promises he has made; there will be a time to gnash our teeth in worry and frustration and anger; there will be a time to assess the lines of battle and count defeats and victories; there may even be a time to thank him for achieving real progress. But tomorrow is a day to stand together and marvel at what we have done.

Never in my lifetime have I seen this. Anti-war candidates lose. Civil rights candidates are admired but lose. But not this time. A decent and intelligent young man is about to become President of the Empire. Our nation is being offered on a silver platter a chance to atone for some of the wrongs it has wrought. Surely, no matter what happens next, this is progress.

Rev. Robinson's Prayer

Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson delivered a beautiful prayer before yesterday's Inaugural Celebration Concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Bishop Robinson is openly gay, causing the bigots in his church to begin the process of secession from the world Episcopal church in order to build a counter-church built around the hatred of gays. Anyway, it's a beautiful prayer, unfortunately not broadcast as part of the Cable TV version of the event:

"Bless us with tears...
Bless us with anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Bless us with discomfort � at the easy, simplistic �answers� we�ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future
Bless us with patience...
Bless us with humility...
Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.
Bless us with compassion and generosity...."

It's worth going and reading the whole thing. I didn't watch the entire concert; I caught three numbers: John Mellencamp doing "Aint that America" which was beautiful if it made me feel as old as Mellencamp looks; Herbie Hancock, Sheryl Crow and Will I. Am doing Bob Marley's "One Love"; and Josh Groban, Heather Headley and the Gay Men's Chorus doing some patriotic song that made me weep uncontrollably. Ah emotion.

Don't fuck this up, Barack.

Terrorists Assassinate Government Minister

Terrorists today assassinated the Interior Minister of the freely elected government of the Palestinian Authority. Said Siam, representing the Islamic Liberation Movement, or Hamas, was killed in an attack along with his brother. Since the terrorist assassins were the Israeli Defence Forces, world governments failed to condemn this murder and obvious violation of international law. Minister Siam and his brother had not been charged with any crime.

WHERE IS JUSTICE?

Terrorist Sympathizers Loose on the Streets of NYC

How easy it is for these people to rationalize murder. Well, there's two politicians who will never get a vote from me.

Heartless Beasts Watch Mass Murder

Here is an entire article with pictures and quotes about the Israelis going out to watch the mass murder:

""Look at that," she shouts, clapping her hands as four artillery rounds pound the territory in quick succession. "Bravo! Bravo!""

Found this link on Angry Arab.

Their morals and ours

From The Angry Arab News Service: Arabs will see this picture, and they will remember it. They will take note that when the Israeli terrorist army was butchering Palestinian women and children, Israeli "civilians" stood and watched cheeringly, while sipping their beverages. "A tower of white smoke rose from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun after another Israeli bombardment Monday morning, and a half-dozen Israelis, perched on a dusty hilltop, gazed at the scene like armchair military strategists. Avi Pilchick took a long swig of Pepsi and propped a foot on the plastic patio chair he had carried up the hillside to watch the fighting. "They are doing good," Pilchick, 20, said of Israeli forces battling Palestinian militants in Gaza, "but they can do more.""

Oh yes. This is a closeup of what made them laugh. The heart numbs.

a voice of reason amidst the bloodbath?

Shockingly, the first acceptable article I've read in the MSM on the attack on Gaza is from Haaretz. By Gideon Levy.

"We've hit the Hamas military machine from the air" and now the ground invasion

Pictured above, the Hamas military machine.

I weep for the world. The Israelis are murdering butchers.

No Happy New Year in Palestine

The Zionist murder rampage in Gaza continues.

The parade of lying Israeli politicians continues.

In order to assassinate one Hamas leader--without trial, without jury, without verdict--the Israelis murdered everyone in his block: men, women, children. Such terrorism and collective punishment has not been seen since, I will say it, the terror of the Nazis in Europe. Confronted with the murder of these children, the Israeli unapologists say, "we blame Hamas for the deaths of civilians." Disgusting.

--

In brighter news, the Cuban revolution has now survived fifty years, despite repeated provocation and blockade from the mightiest imperialist nation on the planet, which is also its very bad neighbor. Long may the flag of Cuban freedom wave.

Terrorists Kill Almost 300 Civilians In Two Days of Targeted Attacks

In two days of targeted attacks, terrorists calling themselves the State of Israel have murdered almost 300 people, mostly civilians, in the walled-off ghetto they control in the Gaza region of Palestine.

Targeting infrastructure of the region's elected government, the terrorist forces -- already engaged in a blockade of the region and in random individual assassinations -- have used the pretext of the Palestinian peoples' self defense as an excuse for the brutal attacks.

Once again the world turns a blinded eye to the murder of innocents and the outrages of the racist settler regime. It is beyond time for this cruel entity to be wiped off the map.

Pinter/Kitt

I'm not a theater person. Perhaps you can tell that by my insistence on spelling it "theater" rather than "theatre." Anyway Harold Pinter has just died, and somehow my first recollection is a line in Sondheim's "The Ladies Who Lunch." But at my dose-of-socialism blog, Lenin's Tomb, from the UK, there is an awesome Pinter poem cited, which I reprint here. Thanks, as it were.

American Football by Harold Pinter

Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.


I had no idea. That is some shocking fist-in-the-gut critique of what...American imperialism? Male dominant culture? I read it and winced.

--

What I am is a music person. And the other sad passing of this holiday time is Eartha Kitt. I was lucky enough to see one of her cabaret shows at the Hotel Carlisle in New York City just a few years ago. In a small intimate room we had seats quite up to the front. She had the energy (and body) of a twenty-two year-old; and this insane magnetism that swept up everyone in the room with a combination of love and terror. Love, at the open flirtation she displayed and the musical ability to make a song weep or laugh. Terror, that her eyes would alight on you and draw you into her act, reducing you to a quivering prop in some larger show. She made everyone in that room fall in love with her; I will never forget it, and rue the passing years for not scrounging up the money to go see her again. I remember dancing and singing and laughing along with her disco hit in the eighties, "Where Is My Baby Where Is My Man." My friend David and I even composed--but never debuted--performance art to complement this song (entitled "Recitation/Suscitation"). May we all end up, eventuallllllly, at our own Monte Carlo in the sky. Purrrrrrrr. What a classy classy lady.

Who, it turns out, hated the Vietnam war as much as any decent person, and said so.

Ibaye, Harold & Eartha.

"This is a goodbye kiss, you dog!"

Amen, brother. Who knew the Iraqis were people of such concise and poetic vision? (the photo shows an Iraqi journalist flinging his shoe at President Bush in today's surprise Bush appearance with Iraqi puppet PM Al-Maliki.

Maferefun Obatala

Today is my 12th birthday as an initiate of Obatala in the religion of Santeria/Lucumi. 12 years ago I was crowned Obatala Yeku Yeku in the Bronx, USA; mojuba baba tobi Asinyabi; mojuba ajugbona okan Arabi. While I am not particularly active in the religion I give thanks every day for the blessings of God, my ancestors, my spiritual guides, and the mysterious Orishas for protecting me and lighting the path before me. Twelve years, wow. Not all of them easy. But here I am. Ashe!!

Mojuba Olodumare; maferefun Obatala; maferefun gbogbo Orisha.

PRESIDENT OBAMA!

I'm speechless. A very emotional night last night. There will be time to talk about all the limitations of his presidency, all the dangers ahead, and all the ugly realities this election may not actually change. I time to discuss how the brave citizens of California think chickens have more rights than gay couples. But for now, it's time to celebrate.

Tomorrow is the day...

I love this picture. It's Barack Obama and his maternal grandparents at his high school graduation. It's such a statement about who Obama is. And all the love and hope his grandma has for him, and the pride his grandfather has, and how the differences in their skin color is just so irrelevant. It gives me hope. And all my complaints about Obama's policies on this thing or that thing, we'll have plenty of time in the future to struggle over those. For now, the thing is, he's got to win. He's got to.

Barack Obama for President

Storyteller David Sedaris:

"I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

"To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked." (quoted on JMG Blog)

For me the decision is clear, as much as chicken isn't always my first choice. Barack Obama for President!

One week to go

Only a week left til election day 2008. I'm afraid to be too optimistic. Could it be that the worst of our national nightmare is almost over? The viper's nest of reaction stirred up by McCain/Palin is frightening. The fact that Obama could be considered "socialist" is a sad sad statement of American political consciousness. Which makes me despair of any real chance of actual socialism. Anyway, it's down to the wire.

Barack Obama for president!

Now back to ugly

the children making monkey noises are a special treat.

While we're on cute....

It's Henry!

More from Amerikkka

From a Republican Women's group in southern California.

John McCain: "I am proud of all my supporters."

Cranky Old Man Loses Third Debate

Anybody remember "V"? Get this crazed lizard-man a mouse, stat.

Who has the cutest boyfriend?

Yes it's a crappy little photo of us. But I think the answer is pretty clear.

Hello Giant Egos, Bye-Bye Democracy

So NYC's allegedly-independent-former-Republican billionaire mayor and Democratic, openly lesbian city council president Christine Quinn have made a devil's bargain to go around the law and give themselves extra terms in office.

I think term limits are a terrible idea. But New Yorkers have defeated attempts to roll back these misguided laws, and both these politicians are on record previously opposing attempts to get around the voter's wishes. Tinpot dictator Rudy Ghouliani made a feeble attempt to extend his mayoralty for a third term in the aftermath of 9/11, and he was soundly and rightfully trounced for the suggestion.

Now a mayor who I didn't actually hate--until now--and a political careerist hack--who I have never heard anything good about--have decided that they are the annointed ones who can override democracy and lead the city out of its current economic crisis, which, oh yes, both have presided over. They will get the City Council to temporarily override term limits and allow them to run again.

Enough. The minute a politician says he or she is above the rules and indispensable is a minute beyond the time anyone should put up with them. It's time for Bloomberg and Quinn to go. This completely self-serving undemocratic attempt by them to railroad themselves into longer terms is blatantly and transparently corrupt. Buh-bye. Get out of town, dictators to be. Not only do you not deserve to run again in the next elections (next year!) but I think maybe you should just resign now for this disgusting attempted coup.

Welcome back to Amerikkka

Hopefully, Obama wins, despite the current wave of rage energizing the racist republican core. But when he's president, it's gonna be rough going. This is a billboard in Missouri. Thanks to Pam's Houseblend for the info and art.

You Don't Need A Weatherman...

The right-wing Republican propaganda machine has begun its full tilt lurch toward painting Barack Obama, through his association with liberal college professor and former member of the Weather Underground William Ayers, as at worst a terrorist or at least a dangerous radical. All decent people need to be concerned at this attempt to tar a relatively centrist politician with such a dangerously loaded brush. In whipping up the right-wing hordes of bigotry and intolerance, it's possible that the McCain campaign knows not what it does. It's also possible, given the unseen hand behind the nomination of Sarah Palin as the vice presidential candidate, that they know exactly what they're doing.

The US war of aggression against Vietnam was rightfully a polarizing conflict inside American society. In thirty years of neo-conservatism, Reaganism and revanchist revisionism, "new Democrats," Bush doctrines, and right-wing media celebrities it's sometimes hard to reach back across those years to remember how awful that war was; how cruelly it took life from millions of Vietnamese and thousands of young American draftees; how it consumed us for years changing our culture and our politics. How we breathed relief at its end, even as for us, here at home, its end was a slow sputter quite unlike the experience of the tanks of liberation crashing definitively through the gates of embassies and presidential palaces in Saigon back in 1975.

The civil rights movement was a stunning victory wrought by the power of millions. Even though its success was stained with the martyrdom of its leaders and the wasteful self-destruction of the urban riots and the unbreachable brick walls of class and corruption, it gave hope to the anti-war movement. Yet the anti-war movement was unable to stop the war. While its pressure must certainly have been felt by Nixon and the powers that be, it wasn't the movement that ended the war. Rather the war's obvious unwinnability and the promissory fig of better relations with the awakening giant of China (and potential allegiance with China against the Soviet Union) that really caused Nixon's henchmen to meet in Geneva with the Vietnamese and agree to phased American withdrawal.

It was in that frustrating inability of the movement to either actually end the war or effectively draw it to its logical revolutionary conclusions and radicalize the nation that the Weatherman movement was born. The Weathermen, later the Weather Underground, despaired of mass action, of the power of people uniting together, in favor of symbolically throwing a few bombs at a few buildings. They may have been righteously motivated, but their decision to abandon mass struggle in favor of what turned out to be a short-lived and disastrous military effort was not a wise one. They argued that "Fascist Amerikkka" was about to unleash mass repression on a massive scale and that open organizing had to be abandoned for the shadowy path of guerrilla warfare. Needless to say, the group that William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, now his wife, abandoned the Students for a Democratic Society to form, was never much of a threat to anyone, nor conversely, much of an inspiration.

Their literature was rousing in a sort of bell jar way. Their rainbow and thunderbolt logo was inspiring. But their gestures were ultimately empty. The wave of general fascist repression didn't come (though of course a generation of African-American revolutionaries did meet a determined and mostly successful government effort to militarily wipe them out). More importantly, by going underground, these would-be revolutionaries isolated themselves from "the people," who simply failed to take much of an interest in the latest communique. It ended badly for the Weather Underground: some of them accidentally blew themselves up. Others ended up in a gunfight with Brinks guards years later in a robbery gone sour. Some are in jail. Some still on the run. Some came gradually back to the light like Ayers and Dohrn.

The rest of the left didn't really fair better. A legion of revolutionary sectlets spawned by the anti-war movement flourished through the seventies and mostly dissipated in the dark days of the Reagan counterrevolution. Those that have hung on through the present day offer mostly wildly confused messages to the few people who pay attention, leaving the American people completely disarmed in the face of today's dire challenges.

It's obvious why Bill Ayers traded in his underground revolutionary life for academia and social reform. It must be said that he has obviously benefited from a certain privilege of class to end up where he's ended.

Was the Weather Underground a terrorist organization? Meh. Perhaps aspirationally, in the sense that all fighters for liberation are called terrorists by their enemies, or that bombing buildings (never intentionally people) isn't exactly a charming social interaction. But in the face of the massive American war machine (and its volunteer officers like John McCain) bombing terror into the hearts of Vietnamese (or destroying civilian power plants and civilian power-plant workers like the same John McCain) I have a hard time making that accusation. In the face of police terror waged against groups like the Black Panthers; or in the face of the US government funding Cuban exiles to hijack planes or overthrow Central American governments I have trouble judging the Weathermen too harshly for what amounted mostly to a misguided youthful arrogance.

Which way is the wind blowing now? We don't need the Weathermen to tell us that. But we do need solutions; solutions only partially and imperfectly offered by the election of America's first black president. While I fervently hope and pray that Obama is indeed the victor in a month, I'm completely frightened by what lies beyond that threshhold. If only the Weathermen and the rest of the movement of the sixties had not so squandered their energy. If only Americans had not so completely bought the big lie that was Reagan's legacy.

I look forward to a dawning new day. But we have to survive midnight first.

That One for President!

Wow...that was fast! A new slogan courtesy of doddering old fool Sen. John McCain at tonight's presidential debate. Thanks to JMG for pointing this out! We'll be getting off your lawn soon, old geezer, and you can have a nice rest.

Gobama!

Here's a pretty song

With a crappy, albeit gay-positive, video. No subtext here, just that I've been looking for this Jennifer Holliday song -- Fools Fall In Love -- since I heard her sing it on Ally McBeal years back. Can't seem to find it on CD or download. At least here it is on Youtube.

Jump You Fuckers

I grabbed this graphic from Lenin's Tomb, a UK socialist blog that is excellent reading. I'm uncomfortable with this so-called bailout. George Bush yells "fire!" and suddenly it's the Democrats who come to his rescue? Something is fishy. I'm glad that Obama is openly saying that trickle-down economics is crap; that former President Clinton says that this is the culmination of a road to ruin laid down by Reagan. But will patching a failing system do anything at all? The stock market is swinging in wild multi-hundred point swings up and down. This can't be good.

The next president will basically be inheriting a shitpile. If you ask me that's as the republicans intend it, to guarantee them a return four years later. On the other hand, I need my job and my ira.

Man, 49, Attacked by Rat in Subway, Lives

So I was waiting this morning for the subway listening to my ipod. It was a relatively crowded platform; I had a cup of iced coffee resting on a step in front of me (I was below a staircase) and was munching on a Chinese croissant. I felt something on my foot, and thought perhaps I had dropped my bag. I looked down. Nothing.

I looked up. Several people were looking in my direction and shaking their heads. I paused. Was my fly open? Was I accidentally singing out loud?

Then I recalled the weekend. My boyfriend had remarked that there were a lot of rats in the subway station. The R line. Brooklyn. He even pointed out one cute little rat pointing its nose out from a gnawed-out hole in a doorway as we waited to catch a train to the city for brunch.

Then I realized what had happened. I went up to one of the people shaking their heads and asked. Yes,

A
GIANT
RAT
HAD
JUST
RUN
ACROSS
MY
FOOT

while I was waiting for the subway. Thank God I didn't see it. Oh my fucking God.

OH. MY GOD. The stupid, it burns.

That's a quote from Pam Spaulding as her comment on the release of the latest Sarah Palin interview:

COURIC: You've cited Alaska's proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

PALIN: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land-- boundary that we have with-- Canada. It-- it's funny that a comment like that was-- kind of made to-- cari-- I don't know, you know? Reporters--

COURIC: Mock?

PALIN: Yeah, mocked, I guess that's the word, yeah.

COURIC: Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials.

PALIN: Well, it certainly does because our-- our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia--

COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.

----

you'll also want to view this. even if you thnk you've seen it before, make sure you watch from about the 1:10 mark.

The Bankruptcy of...Bankruptcy

So a wild ride on the stock maket this week. Down 500, up 100. Down 400. Up 700. Down for the week, slightly. I care about these numbers not because I'm a wheeler dealer on the market but because my freelance income doesn't cover my expenses and my mortgage, so my pre-freelance 401K supplements my expenses and THAT paltry sum of money seems to care about the market deeply.

I have a few questions.

How come there is no money for universal health care, for our decaying infrastructure, for our filthy malfunctioning subways, for affordable education, but now there are BILLIONS to bailout a bunch of greedy companies and beyond-rich corporations and their executives?

How come the greedy investment companies and mortgage companies get to have their debts paid off while those of us whose incomes have been declining in the face of increasing expenses do not?

How come executives will walk away from this disaster with millions in their pockets while the rest of will scrounge around to try and meet higher subway fares, higher real estate taxes, higher expenses for food, higher expenses for anything made of or transported by oil?

How come people believe Reaganite/Bushite trickle-down economics when the money always seems to trickle back up to the rich before it ever gets to the rest of us?

This is a moral issue I think. The government exists to make life better for the people, not to make big business richer. What's going on is frightening but it's also disgusting.

My modest proposal: Fuck the corporations. Bailout the PEOPLE. Call all mortgages held by individuals paid in full. Set a maximum interest rate allowable for mortgages AND for credit cards. Eliminate corporate tax shelters. Eliminate profit in the insurance business: insurance should be for protection not for profit. Fund healthcare and education before the military.

The system is completely bankrupt. WAKE UP!

Why does this shock me

Thanks to JMG and other sites for the info/scans.

Some Republican/Christianist fundraisers havew definitely revealed themselves with their "parody" product. More details:





Somehow I'm speechless. You know you can accuse the right wing of being racist and it comes out sort of abstract and vitriolic. And then they actually prove everything you've said.

Disgusting pigs.

The real Sarah Palin?

No I had nothing to with this one. Thanks to my friend Simon for pointing me to it.

Republican Values

a report on the LA Progressive website...

“So Sambo beat the bitch!”

This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.

If accurate...wow.

Sarah Palin, the face of evil

Sometimes it doesn't come in jackboots and uniforms. Sometimes it comes giving lying and bullying speeches. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Everything You Need To Know About John McCain and Sarah Palin

Watch John McCain stare repeatedly at Palin's ass, and then fiddle with his wedding ring.

The Littlest Mermaid (part 2)

A few months later Eddie and I were sitting at a cafe table. It was a Saturday morning and the broad avenue by the beach was full of tourists. We were hungover but nothing sunglasses and thick coffee couldn't cure. We had celebrated last night. I had a job!

If you had asked me, though of course you didn't, I would have told you why my pockets were empty. Beauty. Light. Color. Art. It was my camera that led me here, to this city by the ocean. The way the sky was changed by the expanse of water; the way the light reflected off of both changed the faces of the people and the buildings, how sun bleached truth out of makeup and color-washed plaster.

I had shown my photos to someone in the clubs who had a friend downtown. The next time I saw him he handed me a name and address scratched on a scrap of paper. "Darling go see him! I told him about your photos!"

I found the address. "Studio Som Novo" read the sign. At the front desk I asked for the name on the paper. "Gustavo... I am here to see Gustavo." The girl looked at me dubiously over the rims of her glasses, but nevertheless got up from her seat. As she walked away I was sure the little extra shake of her behind was for my benefit. When she returned from an inner office she gave me the up and down. "Senhor Gustavo will see you." I smiled at her, despite the upturn of her nose.

Gustavo wore an ill-fitting suit. But he was friendly. He rose from his desk to shake my hand. "Gigi said you were an excellent photographer."

I was surprised that he called my friend Gigi. Apparently Gilberto and Gustavo knew each other somewhat better than I had assumed. It was a long time before he let go of my hand.

I had come with a folder of photos, and I spread them out on his desk. Faces of people. Bright colors from the market. Children playing on the beach. Musicians. Dancers.

"Nice. Very nice. I need someone with your..." he looked me up and down, a lecher's gleam in his eyes "...talents!"

"We try to put out records every week. Some sell. Some don't. You will take pictures. You get paid if they sell. I will introduce you to our creative director."

And so it began, my humble career. I stopped by where Eddie worked, that salon in the big hotel downtown. I fanned the bills out Gustavo had given me as a small advance. "Baby we are going out to celebrate!"

That was last night. The rest of the evening I remembered dimly. So many drinks. Much laughter. There was that fight at one bar, a drunken tourist laid low across a table, drinks and plates smashing onto the tiled floor, when he refused to stop talking to some tough guy's girl. At some point Roberto found us, he was high as a kite, asking if we had seen Zizi and her American boy. No, we said, and he shuffled off, eyes fixed on a young tourist sitting alone at the bar.

I sipped from my cup and squinted behind my dark glasses, glad for the coffee, which was hot and sweet. Eddie was reading the paper. "Hey look at this." He spread the paper down in front of me, pointing to the full-page advertisement.

"GREAT CONCERT FOR IEMANJA THE STAR OF THE SEA
Sr. Henry Gilson and His Orchestra
featuring A Pequenina Sereia and Her Guitar"

And there in the picture below the gaudily laid out headline was that girl. She looked small and out of place photographed on some bandstand between a row of violinists and three flautists. She gazed at the camera with the look of a deer caught in headlights. The concert was not at some bar or club, but a regular hall. And it was that very week.

I brought the ad to Gustavo that Monday. "Oh yes. Henry's little mermaid. Not much of a nymph, is she? Still a lot of baby fat on that one," he said.

I asked him if he had heard her sing. "There is something about her."

Gustavo pursed his lips. "Henry has been after me to put him on a record. You go to this show. Take pictures. See if you can coax a smile out of your little sea nymph. Everybody needs a pretty girl on their record cover, otherwise it doesn't sell. If you can make her look good maybe I will give Henry what he wants. Iemanja eh? Henry's soul must be blacker than I know."

Feeling dismissed I turned and left his office. I walked around the offices and met my new coworkers. At the front desk the girl with the glasses handed me an envelope with a few bills and two tickets. "Senhor Gustavo says make sure you get a nice photo. No pretty pictures no sales. And no money means this shithole closes down and I am not going back to that typing pool."

I raised my eyebrows. I had no idea our little desk girl had the mouth of a sailor. I assured her I was up for the challenge. I pocketed the envelope.

"So do you have a girlfriend?" she asked not quite coquettishly as I turned to leave. Surely I waited too long to answer. "Pahh," she spat, "another faggot. Just like the rest." She turned back to her desk and waved me out the door.

A few nights later I put a few rolls of film in the pocket of my only suit and slung my cameracase over my shoulder. I was meeting Zizi for a cocktail before the show. I had called her up from a payphone and asked her if she would like to come along.

"It's an assignment for my new job. But it's quite an event. And all very voodoo."

"Oh how exciting! Shall I wear some flouncy white skirt and wrap myself in beads?"

I assured her that was not necessary. This was a society event not some wild ceremony out in the slums. Zizi showed up in one of her usual outfits, a trendy Parisian cocktail dress. A smart little hat with white lace. A madly huge crucifix was pinned with flowers to her breast. "I told Daddy and Grandmama where I was going and Grandmama cried that I was going to be carried off by white slavers. She insisted that I wear this."

The crowd at the hall was huge. But it was not a crowd of the mothers and fathers of the saints but the usual ladies and gentlemen of nighttime society. A few trendy concert goers, women with beautiful skin the color of coffee mellowed with cream had chosen to wrap their hair with intricately folded scarves.

(to be continued)

Orchestra of Morning (part 1)

My name is Hermes and I am tired now and ready to go home. Though I did not come to this shore, this beach to tell you that, nor did you come here to listen to me talk about myself. You came with me to hear about Sereia.

It's finally quiet here, as dawn laps at the shore, the air wet and salty. The air is heavy as my eyelids now, heavy as the cuffs of my pants rolled above my ankles, wet and stained with water and sand.

Flowers lie crushed in the sand behind us as we gaze now out in the water. Did I say quiet? The breeze brings a laugh, a note from a guitar, a crash of a wave. the call of a bird. If the drums of the night are silent now the concert of the new day has begun. I crouch in the shallow water, and rinse my hands of sand and nicotine. I look up again, trying to guess which small paper boat, now flotsam on the waves, sprinkled with petals and fine ash, its precious cargo of candle stub and bits of bone surrendering to the immensity of the ocean. Good-bye Sereia.

"I remember when I first saw her," I tell you. And I am brought back to that night, so many years before. That old club, right on the beach. Quite the scene. It was before I met Ze, too, that old crowd I ran with. Eddie, Zizi, Roberto, and that American boy, what was his name? He was so easy to tease. So serious until he started to drink. Then the object of everyone's attentions, all of us trying to sound so sophisticated, so serious, so grown up.

We were at a table near the stage, hanging lights and clinking glasses and laughing women and the breeze from the sea. Very chic these club patrons, for the night, though who went the next day to their fancy office jobs and who went out looking for the next hustle and who was there drinking off the tabs of friends was anybody's guess. And the subject of much gossip. Zizi always had money but then her father was rich rich rich and though he didn't love it when his only daughter spent his money buying drinks for faggots and negroes he loved to see her beautiful and admired and never told her no. So now you know two of my secrets, the only one that embarrassed me being the one that my pockets were empty.

Musicians filled the stage, and the din of the club narrowed with expectation and polite applause. Oh now we think we are so sophisticated in our tastes with so much to choose from. Very liberated. But then it was all the season of the bossa nova. It made our drinks more delicious, and it caused our bodies to move involuntarily, charging the air around us with cool erotic tension.

This band was like any band that played at this club by the sea and it made us delirious with each other. Zizi kissed that American boy and Eddie rested his hand on my thigh beneath the tablecloth and we were very happy. Zizi stood up to dance, the American boy oh so drunk and clumsy smiled awkwardly and did not follow. Eddie, whose ass was made for the bossa nova, saved the day and rose to carry Zizi off to the dance floor. Roberto, who it must be said spent most of our evenings together gazing longingly at the American boy's blonde hair, slid over to Zizi's chair to engage in subtle flirting with that poor sodden soul, oblivious I used to think, to Roberto's intentions.

Which left me to gaze upon the band and the most remarkable creature I had ever seen. She was playing the guitar. This was no statuesque beauty. Short, with mysterious dark eyes, skin much whiter in color than her bandmates, she couldn't have been thirteen years old, and I realized she could really play. Thick auburn locks fell over her face as she played; bangs heavy on her forehead; a small birthmark on her left cheek. Concentration framed her face as she strummed her guitar. When she started singing it was with the voice of a girl, yes, but a girl who felt things she couldn't have understood, could she? It was haunting, sad, this first song she sang, oh yes lilting in our tropical way, but full of the pain of life beyond thirteen girlish years.

The song ended and she bowed her head into darkness and a smattering of applause and couples changing on the dancefloor. And then the drummer began a fast song, and she looked up, darkness wiped from her face, and she sang exuberantly joined by other members of the band. Freed for a moment from something this girl's eyes twinkled and her compact, androgynous body swung to a different sort of life with this new rhythm.

The song ended and I swear before she left the stage Sereia's dark eyes met mine. Such old old eyes. The deepest saddest gaze I have ever seen. And then the drummer, a very big and very black man very much older than thirteen wrapped his arm around her neck and led her backstage, laughing and gesturing to the other players as they disappeared from sight.

Zizi and Eddie returned and shortly after the waitress brought us more drinks. Surely eventually Zizi handed one of us a wad of paper to settle our bill and we walked out upon the nighttime street to push Zizi into a taxi. Roberto--of course--offered to walk the weaving near senseless American boy off to his pension, leaving Eddie and me to walk down to the dark sands to lie for a while in the invisibility of a moonless night.

"That girl...that singer," I said. "She was something special." Eddie laughed and smiled and kissed me. Here, on the beach, in the sand. And for a moment I forgot about Sereia. For a moment.

Let's hear it for Class War!

It's about time. Nice ad from Obama.

Congratulations, Condi!

Let's hear it for Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice! This so-called "expert" on the former Soviet Union has just single-handedly restarted the cold war, with only slight assistance from her boss, the imbecile warmonger George W. Bush.

First they try to strong-arm the foolishly pro-American governments in Poland and the Czech Republic to adopt some "missile defenses" to defend against Al-Qaeda's ICBM launches (!?) in Russia's front yard. And thank goodness Bush already abrogated every arms-control treaty ever signed with Russia and its predecessors, because now that "democratic" and capitalist Russia has a new prime-minister for life, they can just send some missiles back to Cuba and hey, it's 1963 all over again.

Then they support an ass-kissing pro-Israel regime in Georgia, then tell them, "hey we'll back you up" in private all the while urging moderation in public in their dealings with their neighbor whose landmass and army is only like 300 times the size.

Having provoked Russian aggression by backing independence for one European micro-state but not another... and the Russian tanks are rolling. But hey, gas prices are coming down!

So yes, see you in a local fallout shelter. Hope those 1959 biscuits and watercans are still tasty. Go Condi!!

Thou Shalt Not Study War

Surprisingly there are no thick and musty Bibles documenting my family's past printed in English or any other of the family tongues, at least, not that I have seen. While I am not sure in which German plain or valley my father's paternal line had endured the centuries, it's clear that when the Empress Catherine of All The Russias sent out word that fields of brambles and black earth in the southern part of her realm would be opened to development by peasants less barbarous than those currently calling themselves her subjects, my ancestors packed their belongings into wagons and fled the scene of their medieval serfdom for parts eastward.

I'm sure they had family Bibles, since the Horsts were, if nothing else, deeply committed to their obscure rebelliously ultra-Protestant ways. They were all about the swords into plowshares and the not killing and venerating no kingdom but the kingdom of heaven. These were difficult beliefs to hold in central Europe in the centuries when crosses were battle standards and religious sermons were exhortations to go out and kill people who believed differently. These Horsts were not princes nor barons nor generals but simple people who wanted to stay close to God and close to their own.

So they left all that behind, seduced by this German-speaking Empress in a far-off realm who promised them something that sounded an awfully lot like what passed in the eighteenth century for freedom. They would not have to speak Russian. They could build communities around churches of their own choosing, and hold plots of rich land with moderate taxation as long as they promised to plow and till and harvest. And most attractively they would not have to serve in the Empress's army.


But as the years passed Catherine's heirs were definitely not of a mind to emulate that great empress. The Russian people were wondering who the hell these foreigners were in their midst to be given such special rights. The Tsars cried out for allegiance. The Horsts had dodged marching to serve or fight Napoleon. They had dodged the Franco Prussian war. They had dodged being cannonfodder in Crimea. They had dodged a dozen conflicts great and small. But by decree of the Tsar, they would not dodge the next one, and oh yes it was near.

But all good things come to an end and as they sat in that train, crossing in reverse all the frontiers their own forbears had passed not a hundred and fifty years before, travelling from Saratow to Hamburg to board a ship for an ocean voyage they knew, surely as the prophets in their Bible, that it was time to go.

On that train ride they dodged two world wars. The cousins who might have stood in the fields, waving goodbye as they passed, were not seeing that prophecy clearly enough. The wrath of dictators of left and right, the brutal caldron of the first world war and its revolutions, the apocalyptic tide of the second world war, these the cousins would suffer until the world remembered them no more. If the fields and cities of America swallowed the memories of the old world among the generations begat by the travellers, the fire of war and the ice of Siberia would erase the cousins completely leaving neither ruins nor orphans behind.

And so the train reached the docks. If the Babel of Saratow had intimidated them, the crowds in this ancient city girt against the sea must have been beyond the imagination of those Horstsl. Up the gangplank they trudged into the iron belly of a ship far larger than anything they had seen before. From that moment on there would be no looking back. My grandfather's family put their faith in the waves, the children screaming against the bellow of the ship's horns and the clank of chains and thuds of cargo and sweat of their shipmates.

Amen, they must have muttered, Amen.

Norka Farewell

There were a lot of children. And a lot of bags. What went through the minds of my father's grandparents as they bundled those children and bags into what, a wagon? Sweeping out hay and manure to make room for a brood of ginger children, for carefully picked belongings and the house, the furniture, the fields, the church, the life to be left behind there on the banks of the mighty Volga.

The wagon, full with thirteen of them, which uncle or neighbor chosen to stay behind and drive the wagon back to the land, the land not ancestrally theirs, this foreign steppe, but now, decisively, not to belong to their heirs either.

My grandfather, a toddler at best, but not the youngest, so carried by a sister no doubt. In clean sturdy clothes to last for the long journey. Red cheeks wiped of black Russian dirt, tear-stained? The hope of the journey, the pain of the friends and lives and families left behind. Wrinkled stained letters from distant uncles read and re-read, parsed for signs of hope and divined for clues to a hidden future.

Did the cart's wheels creak and strain as it passed the wooden church buildings that was everything to these simple people, strangers always in the land of their birth. Nine children, loud no doubt. Well-behaved, certainly, but the sounds of high children's voices teasing and playing in German as the Tsar's grim agents checked papers, and documents, and poked, and prodded, and vaguely disapproving of this alien entourage, yet glad to be rid of yet another cartload of privileged strangers, wondering what buonty was to be gained from the space left empty behind them.

Was it to a train station in Saratow, this cartload of German farmchildren from the little village called Norka, past the farms and villages and churches of their cousins, past the factories and the brick buildings of the big city, through the throngs of actual Russians and Jews and Tatars staring at them with curiosity, or disdain, my great-grandparents knowing enough Russian, surely, to interpret the sneers of good-riddance or the wistful glances of I wish that was me. Papers checked again by the young soldiers at the station.

The children, literate enough to read their German bibles and sing their German hymns, staring now at the proliferation of signs in Russian, the signs denoting arrivals and departures, that much was surely clear, warnings surrounding the crowded black train spitting steam. Uniformed workers scurried about seeming to placate this monstrous black machine lest it storm ahead on its iron and stone path. The smell of the fields was gone now, replaced with smoke and soot and coal and tar and sweaty bodies and fear and hope.

Children and bags carefully counted, thrown together now and none missing, not into the cheapest boxcar but not into the car with the plush red velvet either. Much shouting in frightening now foreign tongues, and the reassuring cluck of my great grandmother, and the doors were closed and the whistles blew and the faces of the people stilled and the train came to life and then, right then, my grandfather--was he drooling on a piece of sugar to keep him silent--ceased to be a little Volga German farm boy and became someone else, as did I, not yet a glint in anyone's eye.

Tap Tap!

My drag queen friend Candy Samples tells it like it is about the DL Republican hypocrite set. And it's one damn catchy tune. Go Candy!!

Yours truly is in the cast.