Summary: A couple of Little Snappers/spring styles for the new season. First, a marriage update. The dialectic of the marriage debate seems to be changing. If, a generation ago, substantive discussion about marriage equality almost always got overwhelmed by a sideshow debate over whether queerfolk should even be allowed to exist in the commonwealth, today our presence is matter-of-fact. Now we seem to be litigating the issue of the extent to which queerfolk can be treated as a kind of ersatz Negro, tolerated in society as long as we don’t get so uppity as to want to marry.
Second, an observation about the demolition of Rancho Mirage’s Chart House. The architecturally unique Chart House has been demolished. In a valley full of faux-Mediterranean trashitecture, in which the spirit of architectural enterprise seems to be long gone with the death of the modernist ethos, it is not unreasonable to expect that whatever emerges from the ashes of the Chart House will probably be just another tacky piece of baby shit brindle brown Coachella Valley developer construction.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Sometime during the spring, every fashion house trots out its latest “Spring styles.” In deference to that custom, allow me to trot out, by way of Spring styles, a couple of “Little Snappers,” brief offerings of opinion similar to the brief draft dissents then-Chief Justice Warren Burger would dash off as a way of venting steam about a majority opinion with which he did not necessarily agree.
A SHIFT IN THE MARRIAGE DEBATE
Something interesting seems to be happening in at least our local iteration of the national conversation about marriage equality --- a conversation that is hopefully approaching endgame.
Time was that any discussion of issues involving queerfolk usually provoked a side-debate about whether we should even be suffered to exist in the commonwealth. Usually fought out in letters to the editor or on comment threads, such side- debates often wound up overwhelming the substantive matter under discussion; the sideshow swallowed up the main event.
Indeed, time was that discussing a drag night at the local minor-league ballpark called forth anguished handwringing from our local newspaper over whether it was safe to expose children to “such conduct.” After much unnecessary and somewhat overly public introspection, the Desert Sun finally concluded that our local children would not be irreparably damaged if they were to behold an individual with an Adam’s apple in a dress.
That discussion occurred in 1997. Since then an entire generation has been born and now has learners permits enabling them to operate automobiles. In just two years, young drivers not yet born when we were litigating the issue of drag queens at the ballpark will be voting in the 2016 presidential election. They may also find themselves called on to vote on issues relating to the presence of queerfolk in the commonwealth.
Statistically, it is highly likely that those yet-unborn-in-1997 young voters will find no objection to the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David should be just as free to marry one another as Adam is free to marry Eve. Indeed, many of these young voters will themselves be queer, or will number queerfolk among their friends and acquaintances. Sexual differencing will hold no terrors for them; being queer to them will be as matter-of-fact as lefthandedness, hair color, or eye color. It will simply not be strange.
And herein lies the change I have noticed about the discussion over marriage. Outside of the radical right’s self-referential and solipsistic bubble, in which --- like devout sectaries thumbing their beads --- the truest of true believers continue to reassure one another and delude themselves with the same kind of magical thinking that had them believing until election night that Mitt Romney would be the next president, an apparent majority of Americans has moved past the discussion about whether there should even be queerfolk in the commonwealth. We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going away.
For the more principled, and therefore infinitely more dangerous, opponents of marriage equality, the starting point of the discussion has ceased to be whether LGBT people belong in society; that ship has sailed. Now, marriage opponents seem to be arguing from different, it equally specious, premises, conceding our right to exist within the body politic, but insisting (against all legal history to the contrary) that “marriage” is too sacred to be “redefined” by letting Jonathan put a ring on David’s finger, or allowing Ruth to call Naomi her wife.
To the extent that the mainstream debate about marriage has shifted away from the “ban the homos” dialectic that so largely informed it two decades ago when this conversation began in earnest --- when the Hawai’i Supreme Court first suggested in Baehr v. Lewin (on later proceedings Baehr v. Miike) that banning same-gender marriage might be unconstitutional at Hawai’i law --- we can say that progress has been made.
Of course, the hair-on-fire wing of the conservative movement will never concede for an instant that we queerfolk should even be allowed to exist. They will continue to throw Leviticus at us and to seek to compass our vanishing under color of its proscription, but for now, most of the rest of America has moved away from such eliminationist rhetoric. At issue now is the extent to which we will continue to allow queerfolk to represent an acceptable "ersatz Negro," tolerated in society as long as we don’t get so uppity as to want to be able to marry, and who may be legally discriminated against, being reduced with perfect constitutional propriety essentially to the status of slaves by withholding recognition of our marriages.
BULLDOZING THE CHART HOUSE
The once-famous Chart House restaurant in Rancho Mirage, heavily damaged in a fire of suspicious origin, was demolished earlier this week.
It was architecturally unique in our Pleasant Desert. Unlike most of the homogenized, faux-Mediterranean trashitecture that litters so much of the valley, the Chart House expressed a unique, much more authentic architectural idiom. Though some viewed it as a 1970s-era monstrosity, it had the virtue of being unlike just about anything else in the Valley. It was almost impossible not to see the Chart House and not comment upon it.
Now I’m not about to criticize the Rancho Mirage city Council for its decision to greenlight the demolition. The numbers may simply have militated too strongly against any effort to restore the building to its original condition. What does trouble me is that, in all likelihood, any building constructed where the Chart House had once stood will simply look like every other tacky, Mediterranean-ish building in the valley --- with vaguely tan-ish walls, distressingly uniform terra-cotta roof tiles, and the usual design vocabulary associated with the architectural idioms of the Western Mediterranean.
In short, the ersatz Chart House will probably be anything but unique. It will probably look like every other piece of cheap architecture inflicted upon this valley by developers more interested in a bottom line than in a beautiful building.
We live in an environment in which the color palette of our buildings tends to run from tan to tan, incorporating a universe of shades of what can be described as “baby shit brindle brown,” topped off by “Spanish” roof tiles mass-produced in China.
To say that the architecture of our valley has become repetitive and unenterprising would be to understate the case. The architecture of our valley is boring. Even the recent efforts to recapture the modernist ethos so well expressed in much of downtown Palm Springs or in the various Alexander houses around the valley seem pale and emulative, driven more by nostalgia than by any authentic embrace of the modernist ethos. Again, our architecture is boring, bland, repetitive, and generally second rate. The sense of enterprise that once flourished here has vanished, and I look forward with sinking heart to seeing a piece of baby shit brindle brown trashitecture with “Spanish” roof tiles arising out of the ashes of the Chart House.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City. The views herein are his own. They are not intended as legal advice, and should not be so taken.
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