Repression: It's Not Just for Third-World Dictatorships Anymore

Citizens marked for assassination without trial. Torture. Extended detention without charges or trial. Police raids on the non-violent political opposition. Mass arrests. Government spying. Welcome to....America in the 21st century. Thank you, George Bush and Barack Obama.

Free Bradley Manning!
Check out this article on Al Jazeera English: "Bradley Manning, American Hero: Four reasons why Pfc Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, not a prison cell." (Thanks Jon for the tip). Bradley Manning is a gay soldier being held naked in solitary confinement for his alleged role in passing along classified military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks. This winter as the harsh, torturous and degrading conditions of Manning's confinement became known, Obama said at a press conference, "“I’ve actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards,” Obama said, suggesting some of those procedures were to protect Manning’s safety. “They have assured me that they are.” Hah. The Obama administration is doubling down on all of the Bush administration's efforts to hide its activities behind legal smokescreens and to ease its surveillance of private citizens.

Some will say, "Manning broke the law." Wait, Bradley Manning broke the law exposing the lies and hypocrisies and immorality of US actions in Iraq in Afghanistan? Or was it George Bush and his cronies who broke the law? Why are those war criminals free while a conscientious citizen like Manning rots in a tiny cell? Remember how crucial the Pentagon Papers were to ending the horrible chapter of American aggression in Vietnam? Which has history judged worse — murdering millions of Vietnamese civilians or publishing some secret incriminating documents? Bradley Manning is on the right side of history, and indeed, is a real hero. Visit the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Justice for Anwar al-Awlaki
Anwar al-Awlaki is an American citizen, born in New Mexico and now living as an expatriate in Yemen. He has some truly heinous political and religious beliefs. Allegedly a propagandist for Al-Qaeda, he's implicated in a number of terrorist attacks or attempted attacks. But as an American citizen, he is entitled the rights of American citizens: if he is guilty of a crime, let him be charged, arrested and tried for those crimes. Yet last spring President Obama authorized the "targeted killing" of al-Awlaki. No trial. No charges. No rights. None. Al-Awlaki seems a likely candidate for a guilty verdict and harsh punishment should American law actually be applied to his case; indeed to my knowledge al-Awlaki hasn't protested that he is being accused inaccurately. But assassination based on empirical evidence is not the way the rule of law is supposed to work. What about the next person the government decides might be subject to "targeted killing'? What is the threshold of empirical evidence? Since when is "kill them all, let God sort it out" constitutional process? If al-Awlaki is a criminal, let justice be served, not more murder.

Free the Cuban Five!
Fighting terrorism is something the U.S. government supports, right? Wrong! Gerardo Hernández, René González, Antonio Guerrero, Ramon Labañino and Fernando González are five Cuban citizens arrested in Florida in 1998 and imprisoned as spies. But what were the Cuban Five spying on? Sensitive U.S. military operations? No...they had gone undercover hoping to disrupt actual terrorist actions being planned by right-wing Cuban exiles being harbored in the United States. These terrorists had already killed numerous innocent civilians, as in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner in the Caribbean. But because the terrorists are anti-communists and have close ties to the American CIA, they have been protected again and again by American authorities. The Cuban Five were treated to harsh conditions, excessive secrecy, and ultimately severe sentences after a questionable trial. Although an international campaign has been mounted to free the Five, President Obama's solicitor general Elena Kagan (now on the Supreme Court itself) actively petitioned the Supreme Court to deny any legal review of the case, and the court acceded to that request. Visit the National Comittee to Free the Cuban Five.

Hands off Anti-War and International Solidarity Activists!
Last fall the FBI conducted raids on private homes and offices in the Midwest belonging to anti-war and left-wing political activists. Targeted in the raids and proceeding Grand Jury witch-hunt was the Freedom Road Socialist Organization as well as Arab-American Palestine Solidarity activists. The activists are accused of "material support for terrorism," seemingly because the activists expressed political support for international opposition groups labelled "terrorist organizations" by American authorities. Apparently the government can label a foreign liberation movement a "terrorist organization" and then your right to express your free speech about supporting that movement is now forfeit. These raids and the implied government subversion and infiltration of anti-war and international solidarity movements are ominous. So much for "community organizing."

No One Is Illegal!
According to the LA Times, "Deportations under Obama have reached new heights for two years running, statistics show, but Republicans said they would use their new majority in the House to press for more aggressive enforcement without any path to legal status." Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are not the cause of the economic crisis, but they are increasingly scapegoats for it. Draconian and ultimately racist laws are sweeping largely Republican-run states in the South and Southwest. Blaming "foreigners" for America's problem is a time-honored tradition.

I'm just going to say it: people should be able to live where they want to live. The majority of immigrants without legal papers in the U.S. are hard-working people just trying to live their lives. Sure there are criminals and welfare cheats among them. Just as there are rich people who try to get out of paying their taxes. There are legal problems that can be addressed, but let's face it: this country was founded largely by undocumented immigrants, and at least today's immigrants aren't going around killing Indians. "Comprehensive immigration reform" is a virtually meaningless term used by Republicans to mean keeping brown people out, and by Democrats to mean watch what they say not what they do. My neighborhood is made richer by its interwoven fabric of immigrants, and my country is too. Make the laws reflect reality.

Defund the Machineries of Repression
I don't yet have a smartphone, though I think they're sorta cool, for a telephone. I'm not a big phone gabber. And I like facebook. It's fun to keep up with friends and there's something pleasantly voyeuristic about following people's streams, even those I barely know in real life. And as is evidently clear from my writing here, I'm against people being shipped off to other countries to fight wars. Wait...non-sequitur? Two words: predator drones. Modern technology rises to meet today's challenges.

At the risk of sounding a little paranoid, is nobody else concerned about the repressive potential of today's high technology? Oh peaceful activist today, tomorrow's government might consider you a dangerous terrorist. That sleek iPhone in your pocket with its built-in GPS and your four-square log-in, hello, there's an anti-personnel drone locked right in on you right now. And the person pressing the button on you is three states away. Duck! Those contingencies are among what the defense budget, i.e., your taxes, is providing with all that cash.

And to my mind that little paranoid nightmare scenario brings up the root issue: it's not just laws, which might be just or unjust. After all, in some ways laws are just rationalizations and excuses, easily manipulated, to be rewritten or reinterpreted as needed. To return to my favorite subject, as long as "they" are controlling the laws, and the power, "we" are pretty much at "their" mercy. Simple, eh?

Timely Update: No sooner had I written the above than I read this paragraph in an article about the Israeli disruption of the "Welcome To Palestine" Flytilla campaign this week: "Aided by Facebook, Israel on Friday prevented scores of pro-Palestinian activists from boarding Tel Aviv-bound flights in Europe, questioned dozens more upon arrival at its main airport and denied entry to 69, disrupting their attempts to reach the West Bank on a solidarity mission with the Palestinians. Israel had tracked the activists on social media sites, compiled a blacklist of more than 300 names and asked airlines to keep those on the list off flights to Israel. On Friday, 310 of the activists who managed to land in Tel Aviv were detained for questioning...."

Anti-War Anthems: "Moments of a Soft Persuasion"

Okay, I'm projecting here, a little: the lyrics of this song don't actually mention war, in Vietnam or elsewhere. But the Peter Paul & Mary album this song is taken from was released the same week that two of the group's members were among those beaten and gassed by police in the suppression of anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. This song, a product of its era, is a spiritual affirmation profoundly and simply challenging the mindset that allows war to happen.

"Moments of the soft persuasion
Chiming bells, the first occasion
Tell the rest a smile awaken
Till the last reminder shaken
From whatever rue'd and sorrow;
Now, the time is now — tomorrow.

In the instant of remaking
Just the giving of the taking
In the instant of the living
Just the taking of the giving

Nothing more than earth and water
Smiles of Spring from barren daughter
Who at last in perfect motion
Turning 'round embrace the ocean
Gracious calf of mankind suffering;
Sacrifice of old is ending.

In the instant of remaking
Just the giving of the taking
In the instant of the living
Just the taking of the giving

Moments of the soft persuasion
Chiming bells, the first occasion
Tell the rest a smile awaken
Till the last reminder shaken
From whatever rue'd and sorrow;
Now, the time is now — tomorrow."
— Lyrics by Peter Yarrow

By my reading this song is a fairly profound challenge to revisit an often-ignored yet simple tenet of the Christian Bible: that the message of Jesus and his ultimate sacrifice in the New Testament is a repudiation of the religion of the Old Testament. By his self-sacrifice, Jesus says that the sacrifice and blood-letting and brutality that God seems to demand according to the Bible's early books is no longer necessary: a new age of peace and love brings mankind to a new relationship with the world and with God.

Cynics might well argue that Jesus made his call for such a religion of love in a barbaric world on the cusp of two thousand years more of barbarism and violence, and, to be honest, those cynics aren't wrong. Not being a Christian, I'm not going to undertake a defense of how the Christian church or the faith's believers reconcile what looks to me like a call for a revolution in human consciousness with what has actually been the history of that church or indeed the Christian world. It's hard to find "soft persuasion" or "the taking of the giving" in the Spanish inquisition, the Thirty Years War, the genocide against Native Americans, the Pope's failure to protect Italian Jews in the Second World War, or the hateful rantings of today's American fundamentalist Christians, to touch the tip of an iceberg. As I say I'm no Christian theologian.

But nevertheless, a little spiritual optimism goes a long way. The promise of a new age is foundational to all sorts of religious — and political — movements. The late Mary Travers opened up the liner notes to "Moments of a Soft Persuasion"'s album, Late Again, with a poem invoking the ever-ignored Cassandra: "Cassandra late,/The Prophets' meager wares/Are strewn about a weary world/A time when death requires sainthood undeserved./We are a world of mortal men/And man's great greatness is his hope."

And so this song is a softly persuasive polemic calling for, well, a soft persuasion over the clash of arms or the flash of a knife.

Anyway, I love this song.

A Very Simple Explanation

Anyone, Democrat or Republican, who says recipients of government services like Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security should bear a share of "deficit relief" is saying that regular working people and poor people should be, in effect, paying higher taxes. "Giving ground" to this argument is an utter obscenity.

Listen to their words carefully: when politicians say no tax increases, what they mean is no tax increases for rich people or corporations. It's not complicated or hard to understand. It doesn't require a doctorate in economics. There's plenty of money around. They just don't want US to share it.

And Now for a LIttle Natural Beauty

I spent the weekend up in the Catskills with my boyfriend at a beautiful century-old farmhouse owned by some friends of ours. The weather was extraordinary: bright and sunny alternating with thunderous downpours. The Catskills are low mountains but mountains nevertheless, and the weather is so much more dramatic than down here in the city.


The transitions from rain to dry made for some spectacular skies, hence these photos. Not trying to say anything particularly profound here, except how wonderful it is to get out of the city now and again to see what the world actually looks, feels, and smells like.


These pictures were taken in New Kingston and in Bovina, two very small towns about an hour further out from Woodstock.


This last one is not upside down, that's a reflection in a frog-filled pond. It was the Fourth of July weekend, but of course, these sights are a bit more than a couple hundred years old. I'm back in the city tonight, listening to fire-crackers and helicopters in the warm summer night.

(Photographs by me; click on them to see them larger.)

Repost: Also Born on the Fouth of July - A License to Kill

I'm away for the weekend so here's a repost of last year's Independence Day essay. 234, 235, who's counting?

Oh those immortal words of the American Declaration of Independence, every school child learns them by heart: "He [The King of Great Britain] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Yes that's from that long part at the end. The part you never really read, the long list of grievances against King George.

While it's true that the Declaration of Independence contains some inspiring and fiery anti-authoritarian language and some really finely wrought righteous indignation, it's pretty clear that this document's appellation of "merciless Indian Savages" on the residents just across the potential new nation's frontier is the beginning rationalization to treat said "merciless savages" savagely without mercy.

It's been said that the three main colonizers of the Americas all had different attitudes toward the native population: The Spanish wanted to enslave them and convert them to Catholicism, the French wanted to trade with them, and the English wanted to pretend that they weren't there, or if need be push them out of the way. These are oversimplified of course. But one can see in the history of the 18th-century a hardening of colonial attitudes toward Native Americans, especially in the Northeast. The defeat of the French and their Indian allies in the American theater of the Seven Years War (the "French and Indian War") in the 1760s by the English seems to have pushed settler America to greater hostility toward the Indian nations; nations that were it should be said, unifying and modernizing living side by side with the English. Disastrously, the Indian nations wound up generally allied to the English in the American Revolution, and huge numbers emigrated to English-held Canada upon Washington's victory.

I'm not sure of the specific historical reference point that this portion of the Declaration of Independence is referring to, but it's clear that the nascent Americans saw English attempts to build alliances with Native nations as a threat to settler expansion.



Joseph Brant, whose Mohawk name was Thayandanagea, and who looked nothing like this "Indian chewing gum" trading card from the 1930s, was a prosperous landowner in New York State who as the military leader of the Iroquois League allied with the English against the new Americans. ('Brant dressed in "the English mode" wearing "a suit of blue broad cloth.' points out Wikipedia.) While obviously his military alliance against the Americans post-dates the declaration of independence, it's clear that everybody in 1776 knew there was a collision coming between the western frontier of the colonies and the Indian nations abutted against it. While some of the Indian nations remained technologically behind the settlers, in many places north and south, nations like the Cherokee and Iroquois were growing into, pardon the phrase, "civilized" nations that were in direct competition with white settlers for land and resources. While there were nomadic hunter-gatherer Indian societies, along the frontier of the time this was really not the case. Remember that the wild west of the time was western New York State and Ohio.

The English and the French and the Indian nations tried numerous different strategies of alliance and conflict to subvert the others and gain or defend territorial advantage. Clearly the Americans wanted none of that: they wanted one thing, sovereignty. And so in its first, most important document, the Declaration of Independence, signed so long ago on the 4th of July 1776, the United States of America built right in the dehumanization of native peoples, and the implied right to do something about the threat posed by these "merciless savages." Because everybody also knows that when the colonists labelled untold thousands of people "merciless savages" who don't respect human life, they were pretty much preparing themselves for the coming genocide.

Between the victory of the Americans in 1783 and period after the end of the war of 1812, the borders of white settlement were pushed from the East coast states clear to the Mississippi, with the Indian nations in between defeated. The Americans had made good on their founding words.

History is, well, history. It can't be changed (unless you're the Texas schoolboard), and I don't actually believe that we as modern people are responsible for the mistakes and betrayals of our ancestors. July 4, 1776 brought a lot of good into the world also: anti-colonialism and radical republicanism were historically progressive achievements. But I think confronting our national mythology is a good thing, because if we as American individuals living today are hopefully not committing genocide against Native Americans, the surviving institutions we hold dear--and sometimes abhor--are all built on questionable foundations that do color modern American policy and judgment. It should also be pointed out that the "we" of the Declaration didn't even include the hundreds of thousands of African-ancestored Americans who were, at the time, living out back in slave quarters and not even considered in polite discussions of citizens and their inalienable rights.

So I think it's good to ponder exactly who were the "merciless savages" back in 1776 and the years that followed. Enjoy the fireworks, and the grilled processed tubes of mystery meat, I know I will. But say a prayer that one day those inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness endowed by our Creator will apply equally to all the women and men clinging to this pretty boulder spinning through space.

Impunity x 3: Tales of Injustice

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Random Aftermath

Late spring thunderstorm, Spring 2011, from my office building, New York City.


Gay Pride sidewalk, June 2011, New York City.

Music break: I wish I was a hippie in Hawaii in 1972

This lovely song, "El Rey Pescador," is from the legendary private press album "These Trails," recorded by a bunch of hippies in Hawaii in the very early 1970s. Although the vocalist on this track is the Uruguayan singer Carlos Pardeiro, the album as a whole is the work of a Hawaiian guy and his girlfriend from California, plus a couple friends, sweetened in a studio by an engineer playing the amazing Arp analog synthesizer; the rest of it is not in Spanish.

I first heard this record a few years ago on a music blog, without knowing anything about it. I was excited to find out it's just made it to CD on a small Chicago-based label, Drag City. It features some beautiful singing, lots of acoustic guitar, dulcimer — standard hippy folk psychedelia fare — and the CD reissue sounds terrific. The CD also includes the full story of the musicians behind the record and how its release in 1973 was sort of an afterthought to its creation when the moment it documented had already passed. I heartily recommend the whole thing.

OK, back to reality now...

Be Careful Who You Get In Bed With, Indeed

This video, circulating around the internet the past week, shows an American gay activist named "Marc Pax" recounting how, on behalf of his "LGBT group," he offered to build support for the upcoming Peace Flotilla to Gaza and was rebuffed. He then claims he discovered the Peace Flotilla was connected to the "anti-gay" Palestinian organization Hamas. Well so he claimed.

It turns out that "Marc Pax" is an Israeli actor named Omer Gershon and that this "personal" video is the work of the Israeli government, heavily promoted by the Israeli government's propaganda press office. Read anti-Zionist activist Max Blumenthal's blog and the Electronic Intifada blog for all the lurid details. Even the staunchly pro-Israel New York Times now reports that this video is a "hoax."

This is a prime example of Israeli government "pinkwashing," its vile attempt to split the pro-Palestinian movement by suggesting that only Israel is the true friend of gays in the Middle East. This video is prime evidence that Pinkwashing propaganda is another example of the big lie. In fact, numerous publically gay figures are not only associated with the anti-Israeli Apartheid movement, they are involved with the upcoming peace flotilla, including John Greyson, who created the "Gaza Island" video posted here a few days ago, and renowned writer Alice Walker.

Israel's attempt to present any support to the Palestinian people of Gaza as political support to the Hamas government and therefore aid to terrorists is beneath contempt. That is its rationale for killing Palestinians with impunity, notably the same rationale used by repressive regimes worldwide. Call your enemies "terrorists" and people will look away as you butcher women and children. Every tyrant knows this and the fake-democracy Israel has learned that lesson well.

The Israeli government is pulling out all the stops to try to sabotage the Peace Flotilla. Having already announced it will repeat its acts of piracy in international waters, Israel and its hasbara propagandists as well as outright saboteurs are waging a massive campaign of disruption.

Mondoweiss and Max Blumenthal report on how the virulently anti-gay American pastor John Hagee is a bankroller of the so-called Israel Law Center, which just tried to sabotage the Flotilla by pressuring the crisis-ridden Greek government to declare the American flotilla ship, docked at a Greek port, "unseaworthy." So much for Israel's pro-gay credentials. It thrives on taking money from anti-gay American fundamentalist Christians eager for the end times which they pray Israel will hasten. Mondoweiss also reported that another Flotilla vessel docked in Greece has been physically sabotaged.

The Israeli government has been trying to warn journalists off the Flotilla as well: "I think we're seeing an absolute last ditch and paniced effort by the Israeli government to control the narrative of these flotilla ships. It's well known that activists on board last years flotilla recorded all events that took place and Israel has confiscated and destroyed most of the footage and so I think the Israeli government specifically addressing journalists is sending a message to the international community that Israel is going to, at all costs, control the narrative and control the story of these flotilla ships. Now the fact journalists have not wavered I think is a good sign for the international media and press freedom,"according to leftwing Israeli-American journalist Joseph Dana working for The Nation.

Don't be fooled: if you climb into bed with Israel and its lies you're climbing into bed with piracy and murder.

NY State Victory: Divorce Equality!

In a brilliant display of political maneuvering, and a stunning defeat for anti-gay bigots, New York's governor Cuomo succeeded last night in getting a marriage equality passed in the state's Republican-controlled State Senate. The previous governor had been unable to get a similar bill through two years ago when the State Senate was controlled by Democrats; this year's effort involved a massive behind the scenes push from marriage equality advocates, and the addition of somewhat redundant language that absolutely positively guaranteed religious institutions could hang on to bigoted practices if they so desired. Cuomo signed the bill into law almost immediately upon its passage.

Despite the massive lobbying efforts of hateful organizations like the National Organization for [sic] Marriage and New York's wretched Conservative Party, and despite rallies organized by bigoted religious fundamentalists (including one led by the lone Democratic Senate opponent Ruben Diaz, who is also a Pentacostal preacher), the bill passed with a several-vote majority: four brave Republicans bucked their party line and crossed over to support it. The NOMbies and their ilk tried again to inflict their backward beliefs and questionably selective interpretation of religion on our secular society and failed. Thank God decent people with a greater respect for the law and a more loving spiritual/religious philosophy prevailed.

And all of this on the Friday of Gay Pride Week, two days before one of the world's largest lesbian and gay pride parades takes to the streets of Manhattan. It's certainly something to celebrate, even if it's a local victory. This makes only six states where marriage of same-sex partners is recognized, and federal laws like DOMA and numerous state constitutional bans on marriage equality make anti-gay statutes still the law of the land as a whole.

According to friends, the streets of the Village were full of celebration last night, even though the uber-gentrified neighborhood is the shadow of the gayborhood it once was: only investment bankers and celebrities can afford to live there these days. I'm looking forward to more street partying tonight, and to a triumphant pride parade tomorrow. But as real and joyful as this victory is, I feel called to qualify the celebratory tone.

While as long as the marriages of straight people are recognized and legally advantageous, it's only just that the marriages of gay people be treated equally under the law. But what about that institution of marriage? Those of us of a certain age can remember a time when marriage was rightfully derided as a outdated relic of the past. Its origins as a tradition are not actually in the glorification of love or the holy sanctification of family relationships, but in a bourgeois property relationship where women were turned into the property of men.

And for many of us, a fairytale picture of marriage as the pinnacle of human fulfillment does not jibe with reality. My parents divorced after fifteen or so years of marriage before I was ten. My mother's second marriage lasted a little over a year; and my father once described his second marriage as an "on-again off-again" thing. My father's father divorced my father's wife when he (inaccurately) questioned my father's paternity. My mother and my grandmother were both forced to retool their lives completely upon finding themselves single. While my mom worked when she was married, she had to find a new career that would support the two of us independently. My grandmother was forced to find work in the mid-1930s, no easy feat. And yet despite hardship and disappointment, I don't think either my mother or grandmother would have described their lives as lesser for having spent the greater parts of their lives unmarried.

Closer to home and modern times, I love my boyfriend very much and feel very lucky to be with him for the six or so years we've been together, but our relationship is what we make of it: I'm not sure how recognition by the state would change its trajectory or legitimize our intimacy.

It's not that I'm heartless: I've read those stories of many-decades-long gay partners finally being able to marry with a tear in my eye. During the brief period when marriage equality was the law in California, lesbian activist pioneers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were able to marry in 2008 after being a couple for fifty-six years, a few months before Del Martin passed on at the age of 87. And yet I wonder what are the ramifications of the gay movement, which once described itself as the "gay liberation movement," now aiming at the much more earthbound target of equality through marriage rights.

As I recently wrote, I grew up knowing I was gay. I never fantasized about getting married. Since I was never interested in meeting "the right girl," that ritual held no power for me. While the times I have been single I usually longed for a steady relationship; but what I longed for was companionship and intimacy and deep friendship, not a ceremony of bells and lace, and not a piece of paper from the government. How will little gay boys in the future grow up? Will they feel unfulfilled if they're not married in white by their early twenties? And what about our new gay divorcees? Will gay people get married too often? Everybody thinks straight people who get married and divorced too often are losers. How will that change gay male culture, where promiscuity and serial monogamy seem more accepted as alternatives to life-long commitment?

There's a collective of queer activists called "Against Equality." While I don't endorse their views as a whole, I think they ask provocative, important questions. Here's an excerpt from their statement on marriage:

"When it comes to gay marriage, the times, they are a-confusing. For instance, we recently overhead some people extolling the virtues of marriage, and how it allowed them to finally join in family gatherings as respectable married people, instead of skulking in as shamefully unmarried partners. They reminisced about the joys of being able to walk up to coworkers and introduce their husbands, the sparkle of their wedding rings legitimizing their socially sanctioned and forever-to-be unions....

Gay marriage apes hetero privilege and allows everyone to forget that marriage ought not to be the guarantor of rights like health care. In their constant invoking of the “right” to gay marriage, mainstream gays and lesbians express a confused tangle of wishes and desires. They claim to contest the Right’s conservative ideology yet insist that they are more moral and hence more deserving than sluts like us. They claim that they simply want the famous 1000+ benefits but all of these, like the right to claim protection in cases of domestic violence, can be made available to non-marital relationships.

We wish that the GM crowd would simply cop to it: Their vision of marriage is the same as that of the Right, and far from creating FULL EQUALITY NOW! as so many insist (in all caps and exclamation marks, no less) gay marriage increases economic inequality by perpetuating a system which deems married beings more worthy of the basics like health care and economic rights."

It's food for thought. Marriage equality is an important social victory, but when it turns to divorce equality, perhaps we should remember that civil rights and the liberation and fulfillment of human spirit are not equivalent. What is that prize we're keeping our eyes on, anyway?

(That art above is a quick ten-minute Photoshop cut and paste job by me, courtesy of Google images and modern technology. That's Barbie's Change-of-Heart Ken and Marx's Sam Cobra tying the rainbow ribbon!)

Hillary Clinton Endorses Israeli Piracy & Claims to Palestinian Waters

Hillary Clinton, Obama's Secretary of State, has just issued a statement on the upcoming blockade-running peace flotilla to Gaza: "We do not believe that the flotilla is a necessary or useful effort to try to assist the people of Gaza...Just this week, the Israeli government approved a significant commitment to housing in Gaza. There will be construction materials entering Gaza. And we think that it’s not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves."

That last sentence is the clincher: the flotilla has no intention of going near Israeli waters. It intends to go into Palestinian waters off Gaza. And besides that, the last flotilla, on which Israeli commandos assassinated eight peace activists including one American citizen (with total impunity), was in international waters when it was attacked. The flotilla is an example of nonviolent activism, which the American government claims to endorse, supporting international law and the rights of the Palestinian people, which the American government also claims to endorse, and now the American government, in advance, takes the side of pirates and murderers.

Back in 2009, Clinton claimed "the new U.S. administration will vigorously pursue the creation of a Palestinian state, stressing that movement toward Palestinian independence seems 'inescapable.'" Apparently her definition of a Palestinian State means something different than an independent nation with control of its own borders and neighboring waters, in other words, an Apartheid-style Bantustan.



(News first noted on Mondoweiss.)

Pinkwashing, a Definition

Timely for gay pride, from "The Queer Shadow Gallery Collective" and endorsed by a number of Arab queer organizations and individuals, June 2011:

Pinkwashing aims to sell Israeli racism, colonialism and apartheid as democratic and gay-friendly. This happens through bifurcation: On one hand, Israel, and especially Tel Aviv, are represented as cosmopolitan and LGBT, queer and trans-friendly places. At the same time, war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories and racist discrimination against Palestinians living in Israel are being euphemized and “pinkwashed”.

The use of LGBT rights in particular is not a coincidence: separating “gayness” from other forms of oppression and hiding behind claims of being apolitical serves this function perfectly. Ideology almost always calls itself non-ideological. Issues of racism within LGBT organizing have long been a source of tension between activists in the Global North and South, particularly as activism becomes more and more transnational and networks of solidarity are built across borders.

The idea that LGBT rights take precedence over other rights need not be stated outright: by claiming that LGBT rights and activism are apolitical, and by refusing to address these issues head on and recognizing that they are interconnected, that principle is made apparent.

(Photo from Queers for Palestine)

Gay Pride Week 2011: Flashback to 1989 - What a Riot!

This is a flyer from back in 1989, issued by the Radical Faeries in New York City on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The Stonewall Riots — some call it the Stonewall Rebellion — was the mythic beginning of the modern gay liberation movement when New York City police on a routine bar raid were met with resistance. You can click on the picture to see this flyer in its glory, but here's the first paragraph:

"Twenty years ago, on the night of Judy Garland's funeral, New York City cops went about their usual routine of harassing gay-bar patrons. But on that extraordinary night, an unorganized rabble of fed-up drag queens, dykes, radical street queers, and their friends at the Stonewall Inn Bar in Greenwich Village began to harass the cops back. They went on a rampaging riot giving birth to a new spirit and consciousness."

The Radical Faeries are free-spirited gay hippies who exist in a sort of parallel universe to mainstream gay society. They play with gender, politics and spirituality (and frankly, hygiene) in very creative ways: they're sort of modern day holy people, even twenty years after this flyer. This celebration planned a dramatic reenactment of the riot itself, which my memory fails to clearly remind me if I attended. I'm pretty sure in 1989 the Stonewall Inn, while today again a gay bar, was a take-out bagel restaurant.

I think it's important, even as the gay community changes and its priorities morph, to remember that back in 1969 it was not the accommodationists and assimiliationists of the gay world who took us on a journey to our civil rights, but the gay salt of the earth. If history books are full of famous people and "great men" leading the world to new places, reality reminds us it's the common people who really get it done.

Gay Pride 2011: Happy Gay Me!

That's my high school yearbook photo, from the year I graduated, 1976. Fortunately by then I had abandoned the really awful long stringy hair that had guaranteed I would be asked if I was a boy or a girl at least once a week. I was very serious. That's a quote from a 20th-century Chinese poet, Lu Hsun: "From the clay of life abandoned on the ground grow no lofty trees, only wild grass. Wild grass strikes no deep roots, has no beautiful flowers and leaves, yet it imbibes dew, water, and the blood, and flesh of the dead." Jesus, lighten up, dude! There's a more light-hearted photo of me in the Compass also: I'm dressed as a monk in my satirical rewrite of Shakespeare's Othello that was produced as a segment of the senior class variety show in the public high school in the incredibly privileged Connecticut suburb I had abruptly been made to call home for the previous three and a half years. If you've ever seen Ang Lee's brilliant film "The Ice Storm," minus the parental swingers at the key party you've seen my Connecticut life. I remember that ice storm.

I was not a light-hearted teenager, though I was not completely miserable either. Actually I loved school, and did well in it. Straight A's. I had friends in my classes, and a couple friends for after school and summers, but I spent most of my free time in High School sitting in the teachers' lounge hanging out with my English teachers. Mr. Economou and Ms. Burroughs were amazing teachers who challenged me to think clearly. They were great fun also. It wasn't that I was a teacher's pet, though I probably was. It was that I was deeply in physical love with the boy who I thought was the smartest, handsomest boy in the world, who was first invited to hang out on those comfy sofas, and after befriending me, invited me there with him. I'll call him T (having Googled him in adulthood he doesn't look like he'd enjoy being featured here).

I enjoyed cracking jokes with the teachers and learning so much, but most of all I enjoyed the opportunity to stare at T's crotch for hours and hours on end. It's how I spent a good portion of school season for the years 1974, 5 and 6. I didn't have particularly elaborate fantasies about T, but he filled out his corderoys and khakis very very well, if you know what I mean.

I thought about T a lot, even when I was home; though he lived in the very rich part of town and I lived in the very modest working-class section. We were not after-school friends. My mother loved books; she owned a lot of them. My father loved books, and he owned a lot of them. When they divorced the bulk of their combined book collection wound up in boxes that eventually made their way to our tiny attic in Connecticut. I made a nest in those books, and I had discovered all the good parts. I had also discovered that if I read the good parts and rubbed myself in a certain tremendously strange and exciting way, a disturbingly good sensation would occur sometimes involving, well, moisture that was most definitely not pee. Anyway as much as I loved the good parts of these books very few of them offered clues as to why I might find T so terribly intoxicating, and none really helped me turn my fantasies about him into particularly specific lurid scenarios, though I do remember that I had one particularly vivid dream involving reaching into his pocket for some keys. It was a terribly adult book collection, but avant garde literature from the 1950s and early 1960s rarely seemed to do more than occasionally mention queers.

Oh I knew what I was, without ever daring to put it into words. I was probably seven years old and playing with my little friend Herbie in Chicago when his father arrived home from work. His father proceeded to change out of his suit into his casual clothes in front of us. To be fair to Herbie's dad this was done completely unlasciviously without a tinge of impropriety. It was not what I saw when his father dropped his drawers — nothing actually, cause the tails of his dress shirt maintained his modesty — but what I felt. I certainly had no words for it, but here I am forty-five years later still remembering my absolute voyeuristic attraction; what I felt then as a seven-year-old boy is conjured up every time I see an unbelievably handsome man just out of possible reach in the middle age of my adulthood. It was stomach-thumping desire.

I didn't lose my virginity til I was nineteen, picking up a drunken Mexican man one cold winter night at a Chicago gay bar chosen because it was far from where I lived. He had a statue of the Virgin Mary on top of his TV set and a stack of porn in the tray underneath it. To my dismay he fell asleep in the middle of this momentous milestone. As Dan Savage says, "It gets better." So it wasn't like the hormones I discovered gestating inside me at age seven sent me on a ruinous or dissolute adolescence. I made a couple vague sexual overtures to friends in Junior High School before we left Chicago for Connecticut, but they were rejected good-naturedly and off-handedly. No friendships were lost. I developed a very dirty mind, but I was a very good serious boy.

After staring at T all year, he went off sailing for summer break. Which turned his skin a wonderful tan and bleached all the golden blonde in his hair to pure white by the start of school each fall. My last summer at home before senior year mother took me on a summer road trip. In Washington DC I passed by the hotel newsstand, my eyes widening at the copies of Playgirl arrayed beneath the cash register. I remember breaking out in cold sweat and the shakes as I grabbed a couple dollars out of my mother's purse later and went downstairs to make that magazine mine. The first time I jerked off to that magazine I imagine I lasted about thirty seconds. It was a very well read magazine by the time I finally tired of hiding it and guiltily threw it away by cramming it the bottom of a garbage bag.

I've never asked my mother when she figured out I was gay — she didn't confront me with it until after we had both (separately) moved to New York in the 1980s. But jesus the seventies were so fucked up she had to see it. I still remember the awkward evenings we spent sitting on the couch together watching TV movies of the week. There was "That Certain Summer," which history remembers as a ground-breaking movie: what I remember about it is my inability to meet my mother's gaze for hours afterward. And then there was "Born Innocent," starring Linda Blair. Yes, of Exorcist fame. Anyway, Linda is a bad girl, sent to reform school, and she gets dragged off by even worse girls into a storage closet where they rape her with the handle of a bathroom plunger. I can also still remember the loud crinkle of our TV dinner trays as my our running conversation during TV time turned into mortified silence. Well, in my mind I am a little confused whether it was a bathroom plunger in the film or some other utility object just as I'm a little confused at which I tried sticking up my own butt somewhat later. My bad! There was certainly a half-hearted and excruciatingly fumbling birds-and-bees talk from my mother. Fortunately school had covered all those details so it was mercifully brief.

I never confessed my lusts to T. Perhaps if I had been a teenage drinker things might have been different, but alas. I'm pretty sure he knew I worshiped the ground he walked on, or rather, the couch he spread his legs on as he propped them up on the low coffee table in that teachers' lounge. I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the attention. Who doesn't want worshipers, after all? But as though we were living out a curiously inverted "Brideshead Revisited," T's Sebastian act was a kind of private show for me never meant to have an actual pay off. Our friendship didn't last past graduation: He grew up to be the staid suburbanite, inheriting the respectable family mantle and I to be the raging gay liberationist/communist/pagan lost in the gritty big city. For what it's worth, my adult taste in adult men is nothing like T.

When I got to college back in Chicago in the fall of 1976, I felt very unsteady on my feet. There was actually an out gay couple, Marcus and Stuart, if the names don't escape me. Bravely for that time of decade they would hold hands as they crossed the school quad. And I would cross the street rather than be caught dead interacting with them. And that's what surprises me, because as a little gay seven year old, or a little gay Junior High School student or a bigger gay High School Student, I didn't know enough to feel shame at who and what I was. It was only with the passage into adulthood and the dissipation of my happy daydreams of T, that it occurred to me I was not necessarily like other people, and that the deep dark reality of the real me was not necessary something that would be welcomed and accepted by those around me. The next two years would be in some ways the hardest of my life as I strove to become somebody. I discovered I had somehow learned to be afraid of who I might be.

And that's what Gay Pride, a profoundly political holiday, ultimately gave me: the tools to conquer that fear; fear that didn't come from inside me, but was placed on me. I've written elsewhere on The Cahokian about my fruitful steps to coming out. I made it. I had to leave a lot behind, but I made it. I could do a lot more oversharing and talk about sexually maturing through the 1980s amidst the terrifying rise of AIDS, and perhaps I will someday. But the point I wanted to make here, now, was that once I was an innocent child, growing into the only person he knew how to be. Nobody made me gay, except perhaps God Him or Her self. My life was hard and easy, full of joy and pain, like most people lucky enough to make the journey through childhood.

When all of today's anti-gay marriage bigots say "think of the children," I do. I think of the gay child I was. I think of how lucky I was avoiding too harsh an eye of judgment. No parent ever told me not to be who I was. I thrived on tremendous unconditional love. I made my own mistakes. I had my own disappointments. I had my own successes. Every child, destined to be gay or destined to be straight, deserves that opportunity to discover who he or she can become. How afraid people are! And how sad that is, especially for the children who might be falsely protected from having the opportunity to discover who they are, free of condemnation and judgment.

Life is still sometimes scary. But I'm proud to be... me.

Cancel Your Concerts! Shades of "Ain't Gonna Play Sun City"

Gaza Island from Albino Squirrel Channel on Vimeo.

Back in the era of apartheid South Africa, Sun City was a internationally-renowned concert venue in the white-minority-ruled country. It was set up in one of the hopelessly corrupt fake-independent Bantustans to lure international tourists. Eventually, boycotting the hypnotic lure of Sun City was a badge of honor for socially conscious musicians. Refusing offers to play for the profit of racists became an important part of the movement to isolate the apartheid regime economically and culturally. The video above is an amazing (and fun!) part of the campaign to extend that movement to the BDS (Boycott-Divestments-Sanctions) campaign against the Israeli apartheid state.

The video calls on artists like Paul Simon, Moby, Kiri Te Kanawa, Duran Duran and others to cancel their plans to play in venues in Israel. It also builds support for the upcoming Freedom Flotilla 2 to break the Israeli blockade against Gaza: author Alice Walker, who will be on the flotilla, calls the blockade runners "the freedom riders of our time." Intentionally ironically, the American vessel in this flotilla has been christened "The Audacity of Hope." Israel has already announced its plans to commit piracy and terrorism against the flotilla. It warned — hilariously? tragically? — that anyone who defends themselves against boarding by Israeli pirates will be seen as an "attacker" and dealt with accordingly.

The musicians who boycotted Sun City are remembered as heroes who did the right thing. It will be the same with today's musicians who are confronted with a choice: money or morality. This film clip is the work of Canadian filmmaker John Greyson. Major props to him for making such a clever and accessible vehicle communicating the importance of the BDS campaign.

BDS is not just for famous people: it's something everybody can participate in by boycotting consumer products — such as Sabra (& Shattila) hummus — with ties to the Israeli state and forces of repression.

Elephant in the Room: Michele Bachman Is a Pathological Liar and Delusionally Paranoid

That's a quote from 2005, but to my knowledge just-declared Republican presidential candidate and "Tea Party" favorite Michele Bachmann has not, er, refudiated it. Let's repeat it: "Literally, if we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level." Um. Sure! Imagine what we could do for unemployment if slavery was brought back!

Today at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, she said, according to the NY Times: “This hasn’t been talked about very much – the president’s plan for senior citizens is Obamacare,” Ms. Bachmann told party activists here. She added, “I think very likely what the president intends is that Medicare will go broke and ultimately that answer will be Obamacare for senior citizens.” What a combination of dishonesty, paranoia and idiocy. Obama wants to institute a government takeover of healthcare...by eliminating government medicare and forcing seniors to get private insurance! What she is saying is literally, actually, irrational....and worse, her fans eat it up. Isn't the truth actually that the Republicans, her people, want to eliminate government medicare and force them to buy private insurance? Disturbingly, the NY Times lets this bizarre fantasy go factually unchallenged.

Then there's her claims last year about the president's trip to India: "The president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day," Bachmann said. "He's taking 2,000 people with him. He will be renting out over 870 rooms in India. And these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending." This was a lie created out of whole cloth based on somebody's misreading of single misinformed article in an Indian newspaper.

Reactionary idiocy on the Middle East: "Today President Barack Obama has again indicated that his policy towards Israel is to blame Israel first. In a shocking display of betrayal towards our ally, President Obama is now calling on Israel to give up yet more land and return to its 1967 borders. If there is anything that has been proven, the policy of land-for-peace has meant that Israel has continually had to give away increasing amounts of its land and decrease its size. In exchange, it still has not known security. President Obama wants to further this policy by putting Israel in a very vulnerable position with borders that would be extremely difficult to defend....I am calling on President Obama to reverse course and clearly renounce the position which he spelled out today. This is an insult to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the day before the Prime Minister is scheduled to come to the United States." Yes, in print she's taking the side of a foreign leader against her president. She's a patriotic American!

Idiocy on Obama being a "socialist" and on mariage equality: "“This is just the beginning in our fight to repeal Barack Obama in 2012,” she wrote. “Had Barack Obama been on the ballot in 2010, he would have gone down in a fiery defeat. Yet he continues to push his far-left, socialist agenda on the American people. And today, he has declared war on marriage.” Obama far left? Perhaps if your politics are somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun.

She's a foreign policy expert! "Bachmann said there was a name already chosen for that part of the region, but she couldn't recall it exactly. Bachmann said Iran would use that territory as a training ground for terrorists. "There is already agreement made," said Bachmann. "They are going to get half of Iraq, and that is going to be a terrorist safe haven zone where they can go ahead and bring about more attacks in the Middle East, and come against the United States." She couldn't recall it exactly, I bet!

And she pays attention to detail! "Nearly four decades ago, a group of settlers seeking religious freedoms, known as the Pilgrims, marked their thankfulness to God for countless blessings with a Thanksgiving celebration." Yes, she wrote decades.

Wikipedia's description of delusional disorder nails her: "Delusional disorder is a psychiatric diagnosis denoting a psychotic mental disorder that is characterized by holding one or more non-bizarre delusions[1] in the absence of any other significant psychopathology. Non-bizarre delusions are fixed beliefs that are certainly and definitely false, but that could possibly be plausible, for example, someone who thinks he or she is under police surveillance."

From the police report of what was called "Bathroomgate" back in 2005, when Bachmann claimed she was kidnapped by lesbians: "BACHMAN [sic] STATED THAT WHEN SHE WAS GETTING READY TO LEAVE SHE WENT TO THE RESTROOM. SENATOR BACHMAN STATED THAT WHEN SHE WAS TRYING TO LEAVE THE RESTROOM, 2 WOMEN BLOCKED IN AND TOLD HER THEY WANTED TO CONTINUE TALKING. SEN BACHMAN STATED SHE WAS AFRAID AND SCREAMED FOR HELP. THE 2 WOMEN LET HER LEAVE THE RESTROOM WHEN SHE SCREAMED. THE WOMEN ARE BELIEVED TO BE W/ THE GLBT GROUP."

You know, all of this would be hilarious if it weren't for the fact that millions of white people in America are so driven by racist rage that they're actually going to pretend they believe what she says and vote for her.

Graphic snagged from JMG. These are dated but do read the "Best Michele Bachmann Quotes" at the Dump Bachmann Blog. Unbelievably, of course, she has been reelected several times since making many of these bizarre statements.

News from the Malabar Front: US Bombs Over Libya Are Not "Hostilities"

What is it about the war in Libya that brings George Orwell's 1984 to life over and over again? From today's New York Times online:

'The White House is telling Congress that President Obama has the legal authority to continue American participation in the NATO-led air war in Libya, even though lawmakers have not authorized it.... The White House, for the first time, offers lawmakers and the public an argument for why Mr. Obama has not been violating the War Powers Resolution since May 20....

[T]he White House argued that the activities of United States military forces in Libya do not amount to full-blown “hostilities” at the level necessary to involve the section of the War Powers Resolution that imposes the deadline....The two senior administration lawyers contended that American forces have not been in “hostilities” at least since April 7, when NATO took over leadership in maintaining a no-flight zone in Libya....

The administration had earlier argued that Mr. Obama could initiate the intervention in Libya on his own authority as commander-in-chief because it was not a “war” in the constitutional sense.'

Is it not outrageous that Obama is now practically begging the Republicans to assume an (utterly phoney) anti-war mantle? As if their newfound anti-war, pro-War Powers Resolution identity is anything other than an anti-Obama smokescreen. What sheer clusterfuck!

And what unbelieveable hubris: everyone knows NATO is the United States.

Just a few days ago the Times noted: "The United States accounts for about three-quarters of total military spending by all NATO countries, and it has in the past taken the lead in military operations and provided the bulk of the weapons and matériel. ... If the United States did not have large stockpiles of ammunition, a senior NATO official said, the NATO campaign would already have come to a halt. The Americans are selling the ammunition, but it was the American military budget that paid for its manufacture and stockpiling. Similarly, NATO allies must still rely on American Awacs planes and refueling aircraft, American suppression of air defenses and American intelligence gathering. Even with the United States playing a secondary role, by mid-May its operations in Libya had already cost $664 million, according to a Pentagon memo circulating in Washington."

I don't watch much so-called news on TV since it's mostly paid infotainment or government-authorized propaganda, but I do listen to NPR all the time. Have you noticed, as I have, that casualties in Afghanistan are now reported as being "NATO casualties"? As if everyone can't see that NATO means American. Do they think people won't notice?

A few years ago I worked in the music business. The megacorporation I worked for specialized for a while in absorbing smaller, independent companies: When it was still part of German-owned Bertelsmann, the BMG Music Service purchased CDNow, an innovative but financially troubled independent music website. At first they tried to maintain its business, but then the cutbacks started. Eventually hundreds of people were laid off and offices were closed, and the CDNow brand was licensed to Amazon.com. It changed from being an independent site that provided reputable editorial content as well as music sales to being basically an automated brand script on Amazon's servers. Well shortly after BMG washed its hands of day-to-day CDNow affairs, our company had a town hall meeting. The CEO was taking questions. Somebody asked him why he killed off CDNow. You could see the smoke pour from the CEO's ears. Almost tearfully he raged, "How dare you say we killed off CDNow! It's right there on the back of our business cards. It's a great brand for us. We're committed to that brand. We have turned it around into a brand that makes a profit for us!" See, it didn't matter that hundreds of people had lost their jobs. It didn't matter that CDNow the company, the employer, the home to hundreds of careers, ceased to exist: in corporate double-think, he really believed CDNow still existed. It sure did on his profitability statements and on his yearly bonus.

My point in this digression is that in the world of corporatists like my old CEO or President Obama, reality is not experienced the same way you and I experience it. So if there's no U.S. "hostilities" in Libya because the pieces of paper in front of him say "NATO," then that's the way it must be. It's not war...in the constitutional sense.

Excuse me, but fuck that BS.

(Illustration from the excellent left-wing "Rag Blog." That's Obama's now painfully embarrassing Nobel Prize bleeding on his lapel.)

If You Don't Support Gay Marriage, Don't Get Gay Married!

Last year in a landmark case in California, two well-known lawyers were hired to sue the State of California to overturn Proposition 8, a ballot measure banning marriage equality (poorly called "gay marriage" or "same-sex marriage"). The judge in the case, Vaughn Walker, ruled against Prop 8; it later turned out that the judge himself was gay. Today a judge threw out an attempt to void Judge Walker's ruling made by right-wing bigots who claimed Walker had a conflict of interest.

I followed the Boies-Olsen case that overturned Prop 8. Despite today's ruling, it returns to the legal limbo of appeal, so it's not likely that marriage equality will return to California immediately. It's even possible that the case will find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. But what's fascinating about the Boies-Olsen case against Prop 8 is how thorough and methodical it was. The opponents of allowing gay people the same civil rights that straight people have rely on quick soundbites to make their case. When challenged to actually defend their case in a court of law, it turns out they don't have one. It's worth tracking down some of the summaries of the case from last year. Because one by one, the Boies-Olsen team calmly and coolly destroys every argument made by people who are shown in the end to be basing their arguments solely on their own bigoted notions. And while American law allows people to hold bigoted notions, even proclaim them loudly and freely in church or the public square, it does not allow them to hold bigoted notions over actual civil rights. Well, at least in theory.

This is why the right wing organizations like the detestable National Organization For [sic] Marriage, or NOM, would like so desperately to squelch the California case: because for once it shows that all the emotional, misleading, and ultimately lying propaganda that they spew is so much dishonest cover for nothing that might actually provide a legal basis for the denial of gay couples their right to marry. The trial and its verdict showed that the religious-fundamentalist arguments of such people have no bearing on civil law. The trial basically stripped the bigots' lies bare. Which they hate, more than anything, being caught with all their fake love-the-sinner-I-don't-hate-anybody posturing exposed as nothing but the bigotry it is.

Here in New York we're allegedly one Republican state senator vote away from marriage equality. We've been down this path before, with sad and disappointing results, but this time the politicos swear we have a chance. Two Republicans and several conservative Democrats are allegedly already committed to vote yes. The new governor Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bloomberg have been applying pressure to legislators. Bloomberg, who bankrolled last year's Republican recapture of the State Senate, is now saying he'll donate to the reelection campaigns of any Republican legislators who vote in favor of marriage equality (NOM and the Conservative Party who endorsed racist horse-fucker Carl Paladino last year are threatening to unseat any such Republicans). Friday is apparently the deadline for a vote.

It would be nice to see marriage equality come to New York in June, marked as Lesbian and Gay Pride Month. A happy ending is not guaranteed: finding that last vote is gonna be difficult. And frankly, should anybody be voting on the rights of minorities? There's a certain injustice in that in and of itself. And how about the irony of the "small government" advocates many of the rightwingers claim to be here advocating that the government stand in the way of civil rights? Remember that to the teabaggers, "freedom" means doing what they say.

Anyway, cross your fingers.

The Laughing Faces of Evil

Who are these jovial people and what are they laughing about? These are the Republican presidential candidates at tonight's debate, and they're laughing at you, America.

I couldn't bear to watch any of it, and having read a number of live blogs and articles, I made the right decision. These people are monsters, every last one of them. They think it's funny to talk about enshrining discrimination against gay people in the constitution. They would rather orphaned and unwanted children languish in group homes than be adopted by loving foster parents who happen to be gay. They actually look admirably upon the social policy of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. They want to take away the rights of working people to organize. They want loyalty oaths and the right to choose who among those of us who live are here are good enough to be called real Americans. They don't understand the separation of church and state, and they think that their religion is not only better than yours, it gives them the right to make you do what they tell you. These people think that corporate profits and the right of rich people to have even more and more money are more important than the right of you and I to afford medical care. These people believe they have the right to lie as much as they want if it means they can have power over you and me. These people admire the mobs in occupied Jerusalem who just chanted "butcher the Arabs," and yet some of them claim to be against America's current wars.

Me, I'm not laughing at all.

Anti-War Anthems: "Saigon Bride"

The version of this song I'm familiar with is from Joan Baez's 1967 album "Joan" and bears a beautiful, mournful string arrangement by Peter Schickele ("PDQ Bach," who arranged many of her early works). The version above was recorded live in concert in Italy is spare and acoustic.

She says something in her introduction above that really resonates with me, "I'd like to start by making one thing clear. I feel that I carry the guilt of the United States aggression in Vietnam, and I'm fighting against this and any other violence." I was watching one of those Iraq-war movies over the weekend that didn't make much of a commercial impact and I realized the terrible guilt that all of us in this country bear for the tragedies in the Middle East. Even those of us who protested against these wars — back in Vietnam in the 1960s or Iraq in the 2000s — failed to prevent the carnage of these wars, and every moment we pretend that we don't know about the ongoing horror our government bears responsibility for, creases our good conscience. We should be shouting about these things all the time.

This song is dated in some ways with its specific references to "red and yellow," but it communicates the cynicism of those who backed the war and created lies of rationalization. I remember the cultural wars over heroes like Joan Baez and Jane Fonda who did the right thing against so much pressure at the time. They were very brave.

Farewell my wistful Saigon bride
I'm going out to stem the tide
A tide that never saw the seas
It flows through jungles, round the trees
Some say it's yellow, some say red
It will not matter when we're dead

How many dead men will it take
To build a dike that will not break?
How many children must we kill
Before we make the waves stand still?

Though miracles come high today
We have the wherewithal to pay
It takes them off the streets you know
To places they would never go alone
It gives them useful trades
The lucky boys are even paid

Men die to build their Pharoah's tombs
And still and still the teeming wombs
How many men to conquer Mars
How many dead to reach the stars?

Farewell my wistful Saigon bride
I'm going out to stem the tide
A tide that never saw the seas
It flows through jungles, round the trees
Some say it's yellow, some say red
It will not matter when we're dead

(Music by Joan Baez, Lyrics by Nina Duscheck. © 1967 Robbins Music Corporation and Chandos Music)

My Favorite Things

I've noticed a slight uptick in blog readership over the past couple months. Which is great! I don't write this blog to make money or anything, just as a creative outlet in a sometimes frustrating and soul-deadening world. I recognize the worldview presented here is a complicated mix of politics, culture, spirituality and personal identity. It is, after all, a complicated world: call it an attempt to rise to the challenge.

Anyway I realize having written this blog at various rates for several years now — wow almost five — a lot of the writing that I'm most proud of is buried in that Blog Archives bar at left. So for the record, here are links to some of my personal favorite Cahokian posts.

Echoes of a Past Life: Gay Libre/Patria Libre
An extended account of gay life under the Sandinistas in Nicaragua back in 1986.

The Massacre Monument
An essay on making and keeping enemies from the Fort Dearborn Massacre to 9/11.

Everybody Draw Muhammad?
On Islamophobia and cartoonists.

More on Left-Wing Homophobia: My Story of Survival
In a different time and place, a young gay men discovers the Left isn't all it was made out to be.

The Terror and Beauty of Difficult Music and the Miracle of Creation
Listening to Miles Davis and other challenges.

Of Tea Parties and Things Left Unsaid
On the open secret of teabagger racism.

Echoes of a Past Life: A Ball of Mirrors
The healing power of disco.

Echoes of a Past Life: Healing Darkness
A story of spiritual transformation.

Dies Irae
My 9/11 story.

Me and the Chairman
My surprising friendship with Chairman Mao.

---

It all adds up to a crazy few hundred posts. Press any of the labels at right for what I hope is a stimulating collection of images and ideas. Thanks for stopping by!

Politicians' Follies

It seems to be the political sweet season. Here's a few must-read links.

Herman Cain Casting Call
Courtesy of We Are Respectable Negroes blog, a chilling Herman Cain video coupled with a leaked casting-call for a Cain commercial. Includes this priceless paragraph:

"7. Arab American with Dog. One person from the Middle East is needed with his or her dog. Preferably, a yellow Labrador retriever or a lovable mutt who enjoys interacting with others. The dog should be a puppy. If it is exceptionally talented and has prior acting experience, an older animal will also be acceptable."

Read the whole post here.

The Important Lies of Anthony Weiner
The underwhelming Weinergate generated some hilarious headlines. But what about the actually important lies Weiner has told? Hint, they're about neither his penis nor whether he sexted his facebook friends.

"WEINER: You can see a difference in the development in the West Bank with 11 percent year over year growth, with no Israeli occupation there either, with increasing access to checkpoints...
COHEN: No occupation in the West Bank, did I hear you right?
WEINER: Yes."

Read the list of his actual lies on Mondoweiss.

T-Paw's Imaginary Economic Plan
Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty entered the Republican race with a plan to oppose gay adoption. And with a plan for full economic recovery achieved...by lowering taxes! Ezra Klein demolishes T Paw:

"This plan isn’t optimistic. It isn’t a bit vague. It’s a joke. And I don’t know which is worse: The thought that Pawlenty knows that and went forward with this pandering, fantasy-based proposal anyway, or the thought that he doesn’t know it, and he really thinks this could work."

Read the whole thing on WaPo. And hey Minnesota, what is wrong with you people? This guy AND Michelle Bachmann?

Breaking: Newt's Rats Jump Ship

As of this posting, Newt Gingrich's campaign team just walked out on him.

"At least Newt wasn't being treated for cancer when this happened."

Hilarious analysis at aplainblogaboutpolitics.

Rick Santorum Doesn't Like Being Made Fun Of

Also recently officially-announced ultra-right wing and ultra-uptight Republican candidate Rick Santorum has a google problem. His program consists of little more than his hatred of gay people. Watch him whine frothily and then read the comments of the gay people who rightfully hate him back at Joe.My.God.

Sarah Palin Said Something Unintelligible
Oh wait, I was posting news.

"How To Survive a Plague"

This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of the medical establishment realizing that a new and virulent killer was in our midst. Back in 1981, HIV/AIDS was not yet understood, nor even accurately named. It would be years before scientists and doctors understood what they were dealing with, or could name it correctly, much less treat it; but back then they recognized that the disease killing a small number of gay men seemed to be something new and dangerous. Now, thirty years later, millions of lives around the world have been lost to the disease; millions more people live with the virus in their systems, and while expensive treatment seems to have greatly reduced its mortal danger, HIV/AIDS remains without an actual cure. I remember 1981 like it was yesterday. I remember the faces no longer here. I remember the fear that gripped us as AIDS spread.

"How To Survive a Plague" is the name of an exciting new documentary film being created by David France, a journalist, activist, and now filmmaker with thirty years of experience bearing media witness to the AIDS years. (He's also a dear friend referred to obliquely throughout this blog; our friendship began that same 1981, the year we both moved to New York City from the Midwest.)

Still in production, "How To Survive a Plague" uses archival footage and modern interviews to tell a truly miraculous story. It tells how a small group of activists not only waged a political struggle around the disease and its disregard by American political authorities, but more than that also: How they resolved to help themselves survive by pushing the scientific edge, leading an unfocused and uncaring scientific establishment to the medical breakthroughs that since the early 1990s have saved so many lives. The film reveals how central and crucial the activism of the gay community and people with AIDS themselves was to transforming HIV from an automatic death sentence to something that could be survived. The state of AIDS/HIV today is shown to be the result not of medical or scientific luck, but the result of the determination to survive of people the U.S. government considered entirely expandable.

A trailer for the film is not yet public; when one is available I will post it here. I can tell you what I have been privileged to see privately is absolutely stunning: it's moving and simply beyond inspiring. You can "like" the film's facebook page for updates and more information.