Summary: Christmas is a pain in the ass. Crises, snits, and quarrels, ridiculous culture war confrontations, fights over politics, and disappointment at the failure of unrealistic expectations for the season are often enough to cause many of us to growl “bah, humbug!” and to retreat from Christmas altogether. Our surly moods often express themselves in such things as retreating to our places of work, to try to get some work accomplished during the silent time when nobody else is around. Yet in the silence, we cannot avoid contemplating the subversion the Infant in the manger came to set in train. In a time and a society that demonizes the powerless and punishes the poor, we may yet acknowledge some incremental steps toward satisfying our duty of compassion toward the neighbors Christ our Savior called us to love as we love ourselves. The works of justice to which He called us are still incomplete; “substantial additional work” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98, 110, is still needed, but on this Christmas, we may still, with full consciousness of the subversive nature thereof, dare to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. Merry Christmas and happy holidays. The Savior is at hand! O come let us adore Him.
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It’s easy to hate Christmas. It’s a pain in the ass. Start with the canned Christmas music and the pre-Yuletide shopping season whose beginning advances ever further into the liturgical season of Pentecost, add to that all of the various other crises, snits, and quarrels that seem to erupt around this time of year, throw in a generous helping of the culture war bullshit that crops up right around this time (think of Bill O’Reilly and his idiotic “War on Christmas” screeds, together with his whiny criticisms of the Roman Pontiff and of aggressively ignorant bigots in so many jurisdictions and their aggressively ignorant defenders), and finally layer on top of all of that the various expectations we all seem to entertain about what Christmas should be —-and our disappointment when those expectations are not met. All these things together are a recipe for a lousy holiday season. To riff on playwright Larry Kramer’s famous line, “I have seen the Christmas season and it shits.”
So, like a lot of people for whom late fall and winter are a time of torment, my response to the overload of saccharine inherent in this season is to growl a well considered “Bah, humbug!”, together with an off-color homage to Bette Midler’s character in The Rose: “fuck this shit.” It does not take a lot to understand my own surliness of mood as we approach yet another American Christmas. Certainly, such a mood is hardly enhanced by nosy neighbors who want to know why I have put up no lights on my house. Such a mood is not enhanced by neighbors giving me stink eye after noticing that, rather than put up a Christmas tree, I make do with an Advent wreath (complete with three purple candles, a pink one for Gaudete, and a white one for the Incarnate Savior). Indeed, my mood usually gets so surly by Christmas Day that it’s become a personal shibboleth of mine to go into my office and get at least some work done.
Yet, in the lonely quiet of the office on Christmas day, far away from the importunings of co-workers, the ringing phones, the canned music, and the endless advertisements for products I neither need nor want, the silence lends itself to contemplation, and to a realization that, stripped of all the accretions of bullshit we have piled onto it, Christmas is a subversive time. We cannot avoid contemplating the subversion our Savior came into the world to set in train.
Alan Jones, sometime Dean of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, once noted that "We live in an age in which everything is permitted and nothing is forgiven." Certainly, in a time of culture wars, pandering political grandstanders, and aggressive, triumphalist ignorance, it is easy to fall back upon a judgmental posture that sees little redemption in anything. Yet, the Savior is at hand. Come let us adore Him.
What, indeed, would our culture war hardliners have said about a pregnant teenager traveling with an older man who is not the father of her unborn child? Would they have appreciated the weary dignity —– that weary dignity which is so often the lot of the poor among us —- with which this couple sought lodging on a cold night in winter in an occupied territory? Or would they had seen this couple’s choice of a manger as a place to rest as nothing more than an example of freeloading by the "undeserving" poor?
What would our culture warriors think of the events described in the Lucan infancy narrative were they not possessed of the pre-knowledge that comes from that particular Gospel story, a sacred narrative that has become, over 2000 years, one of the most special and precious possessions of the Western mind? I think the answer is simple. Mary and Joseph and their unborn child would have been described as freeloaders at best, welfare cheats at worst, and instead of being acknowledged as Our Lady Queen of the Angels, Mary might well have been derided as nothing more than a welfare queen, living in the projects and sucking off the largesse of society.
Indeed, applying such a narrative, many of the right-wing culture warriors who have made a fetish of insisting that Jesus was white might well have assumed the blackness or brownness of his unwed mother, sleeping rough in a manger and giving birth therein. For across 2000 years, we have yet to heed Jesus’ call, prefigured in the Hebrew Scriptures, to love our neighbors as ourselves.
And herein lies the subversion inherent in our celebration of the Incarnation of our Savior, the Word made flesh, come among us to dwell full of grace and truth and to draw us all to Himself. For indeed, the whole infancy narrative, the whole narrative of the suffering Savior Who offered Himself upon the bitter cross for our advantage, stands at fundamental variance with the way in which our world organizes itself. For His light shines in the darkness, and the darkness, as St. John’s gospel assures us, has not overcome it.
The Savior is at hand; come let us adore Him.
In a society that regularly demonizes the poor and powerless, the very idea that the Savior of the world should have come into it as the child of a homeless, unwed mother is both subversive and confrontational. For the Infant Jesus did not come into the world to bring peace, but a sword. The Infant Jesus did not come into the world to comfort the comfortable, or to afflict the afflicted, but to remind us of God’s preferential option for Lazarus over Dives, of God’s awesome compassion for those unloved with none to love them.
The radical and subversive teachings Jesus brought to the world call us across 21 centuries to an ethic of justice, inclusion, compassion, and compunction. As we feel a sense of inchoate obligation toward the Infant in the manger, so that Infant calls us to feel that same sense of obligation toward our neighbors.
And indeed, in this year 2014 we may perhaps feel a sense of having in some incremental way done right by those to whom we have so often done wrong. Though the Senate has shamefully left in the lurch more than a million American veterans at risk for suicide or other self-harm, when 22 vets take their own lives every day (Thanks, Tom Coburn, you soulless creature!), the effort to raise the minimum wage to something liveable, to provide some degree of a better life for millions of the working poor, continues to gain momentum. Though jurisdictions throughout the country have had to be chivvied, dragged, and ultimately sued, the corner has -irrevocably, we hope- been turned on marriage equality. Two thirds of the states now embrace marriage equality. And to the everlasting irritation of many on the American right, we’re finally beginning to acknowledge that black and brown lives really do matter, that the Infant in the manger came to proclaim salvation to all of us, irrespective of our skin tone. The Savior is at hand; come let us adore Him.
Yet, in the sacred silence of this time of Incarnation, we need to realize how much more remains undone, how distant we yet remain from the Kingdom of God. To borrow from the language of the egregious Bush v. Gore opinion, “substantial additional work” is still needed. 531 U.S. 98 at 110.
In this sacred time, when we recall again that we are the people of a passionate God, Whose passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, Passion, death, and Resurrection of the Infant in the manger, it is for us, as Abraham Lincoln reminded the nation at Gettysburg, to be dedicated to the unfinished work, to that great work spoken of by the prophet Isaiah:
“to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn.” Isa. 61:1-2.
And to say “bah, humbug” to all the naysayers who believe on this Christmas that we can neither attain social justice nor proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
“Substantial additional work” is still needed. Let’s get about doing it.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays.
The Savior is at hand! O come let us adore Him!
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms as a member of the city Council. The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be taken as, legal advice. This post is an updated adaptation of this blog’s Christmas post for 2013, because the work of building the Kingdom remains as yet incomplete.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Thursday, December 18, 2014
ROOKIE MAYOR, ROOKIE MISTAKES
SUMMARY: Incoming Cathedral City mayor Stan Henry made two fairly serious rookie blunders last night. First, he pissed off the queer nation by trying to blame us for the fact that his political ally, Theresa Hooks, did not get a seat on the city council. By attempting to demonize Cathedral City’s substantial queer nation for his political ally’s misfortune, Stan apparently forgot, or didn’t bother to consider, that Cathedral city’s queer nation represents a substantial voting bloc that can make or break a candidate or campaign. By carrying Hooks’s water, Stan also managed to convey a clear impression that he shares Hooks’s view that queerfolk are somehow “broken,” and need to be “fixed.” Message to the Mayor: we ain’t broke, we don’t need fixing, and you may have just made yourself a one term Mayor. You don’t get to insult roughly a third of your constituents with impunity.
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Incoming Mayor Stan Henry made a bunch of rookie mistakes last night, not least of which was forgetting that in municipal politics, trust is hard earned, but easily forfeited.
That’s a lesson Stan may have just begun to learn the hard way.
During last night’s special council meeting, the new Mayor let his common sense desert him to deliver a petulant diatribe on how awful it had been that Cathedral City’s substantial queer nation had somehow “demonized” Cathedral City’s Best Christian, unsuccessful council candidate Theresa Hooks, who, instead of participating in the interview/appointment process, now stands on the sidelines, pitching a fit and urging her low information supporters to write snippy letters to the editor of the Desert Sun bitching about how iniquitous the process has been.
Hooks had contrived to make herself objectionable to Cathedral City’s queerfolk because of her strongly anti-LGBT views, and her expressed support for Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based anti-gay hate group. Hooks was also objectionable because she was so obviously the political protégé of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, whose disdain for Cathedral City’s queer and Latino communities had been apparent through the 10 long winters of DeRosa’s ineffective mayoralty.
In his petulant diatribe, the incoming Mayor then proceeded to add insult to insult by declaring that he had supported Hooks’s candidacy, causing many in the rather flabbergasted audience to wonder why he had not had the courage of his convictions to move her appointment at the special council meeting held on December 10 to settle the issue of how to fill the fifth Council seat.
That sucking sound we all heard in Council Chambers yesterday was the sound of the community’s trust in Stan Henry and his mayoralty disappearing down the municipal commode.
The reaction of many of us in Cathedral City’s queer nation was one of great disappointment and sharp personal insult. When Stan Henry cruised to an unopposed election victory (not exactly a triumph of vigorous American democracy) for Mayor, he took office on a tide of goodwill. A city that had grown tired of the ten ineffective winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s ego-driven, sociopathic mayoralty greeted Stan Henry’s coming with a great deal of what now turns out to have been unrealistic anticipation. If Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s final months in office had played out like the senescence of the Ottoman Empire, we had hoped that Stan Henry might at least bring a little bit of the reforming energy of a Kemal Atatürk.
Instead of Kemal Atatürk, what we seem to have gotten is more like Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who infamously set his face against the very reforms that might have kept the Osmanlı Sultanate viable against a rising tide of irresistible demands for change.
Among the demands for change that crystallized during this last election cycle was for a Mayor and a city Council that would be more inclusive and more transparent. Both Cathedral City’s Latino community and its queer nation had grown tired of the way in which Kathleen DeRosa had tried to run things on behalf of and in the interest of a right-wing “Christian” constituency to whom she routinely and obsequiously pandered.
And because voters wanted change so much, they were prepared to give the new Mayor the benefit of a great deal of doubt. So eager were voters, in fact, to rid themselves of Kathleen DeRosa that they overlooked the fact that Mr. Henry had himself been a DeRosa protégé, as well as overlooking the fact that Mr. Henry was the only candidate on the mayoral ballot. Indeed, Mr. Henry had first joined the city Council following the 2012 election, when he, DeRosa, and former councilmember Charles “Bud” England ran as part of a DeRosa slate.
Indeed, DeRosa’s obvious intention in running such a slate had been to secure a permanent three vote majority on the Council, enabling her to run the city for the foreseeable future. However, as so often happens in criminal or political conspiracies, DeRosa’s plans undid themselves when Stan Henry knocked off Bud England, and left Stan Henry in an ideal position to put the shiv into DeRosa and take the mayoralty for himself.
It should not surprise us that the political soap opera in Cathedral City inevitably comes to resemble The Godfather meets I, Claudius, all set in Constantinople during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Cathedral City thus lends itself to becoming a hotbed of political intrigue, often carried out by politicians with no real skill therein.
But, unfortunately for Stan Henry, he made a rookie mistake by declaring rather public allegiance to the unsuccessful campaign of Theresa Hooks. Stan, to all intents and purposes, made it clear that not only does he not value the political support of the queer nation, but that he also, arguably, shares Hooks’s view that queerfolk are somehow “broken,” and need to be “fixed,” presumably by somehow praying our gay away.
In this blog, prior to the election, I noted that as a queer man, I don’t need anyone to pray my gay away, because I’m not broken and I don’t need fixing. My sexuality is an endowed state of being, and I believe to be part of God’s ineluctable plan for my destiny and the destiny of the world God created. I accept my orientation and I thank God for what I am, and I don’t need Theresa Hooks or Stan Henry preaching a political agenda which proclaims my brokenness and consequently insists that I and my queer sisters and brothers should be regarded in some way as second-class citizens in the Commonwealth. For the new mayor to demonize us in that fashion is a grave offense, one that will be very difficult to forgive.
Because Stan Henry saw fit to adopt the Theresa hooks narrative of blaming her electoral defeat on the queer nation, he broke trust with me, and I expect he has broken trust with an awful lot of other queerfolk in Cathedral City. If Stan Henry were so hot fired to put Theresa hooks on the Council, we may ask again why did he lack the courage to move her appointment at the December 10 meeting at which the issue was settled? If Stan Henry wants to blame queerfolk for his political ally not having been seated, then he has only himself to blame as and to the extent that queerfolk in Cathedral City do not see fit to give him the benefit of any doubt, or, even more tellingly, come to view him as little more than a pale political clone of his predecessor. If Stan Henry did not realize the growing weight and clout of a queer voting bloc in Cathedral City, and feels that he can insult us with impunity, then he has made yet another rookie mistake.
If Mr. Henry wants to try to regain the lost trust of so many of us in Cathedral City’s queer nation, he will need to proffer appropriate expressions of regret and contrition, and the Council, now with three gay members out of a total of five, will need to hold his feet to the fire, and will need to make clear that all five of them need to represent all 50,000-plus of us. Cathedral City’s queerfolk will be watching, and will expect the gay councilmembers to be more forthright in defense of the queer nation.
Trust is hard to earn, and Stan Henry made a rookie mistake by antagonizing the queer nation last night. One of my former colleagues predicted prior to the election the Stan Henry would be a one term mayor. I think my former colleague may well have been right. The queer nation has long memories, and those long memories are the collective custodian of all of the slights that have been visited upon us by ambitious, but maladroit, political operators like Stan Henry. We’ve come too far, fought too hard, lost too many, and put up with too much right wing bullshit to allow local politicians to insult us without cost.
-xxx-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Incoming Mayor Stan Henry made a bunch of rookie mistakes last night, not least of which was forgetting that in municipal politics, trust is hard earned, but easily forfeited.
That’s a lesson Stan may have just begun to learn the hard way.
During last night’s special council meeting, the new Mayor let his common sense desert him to deliver a petulant diatribe on how awful it had been that Cathedral City’s substantial queer nation had somehow “demonized” Cathedral City’s Best Christian, unsuccessful council candidate Theresa Hooks, who, instead of participating in the interview/appointment process, now stands on the sidelines, pitching a fit and urging her low information supporters to write snippy letters to the editor of the Desert Sun bitching about how iniquitous the process has been.
Hooks had contrived to make herself objectionable to Cathedral City’s queerfolk because of her strongly anti-LGBT views, and her expressed support for Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based anti-gay hate group. Hooks was also objectionable because she was so obviously the political protégé of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, whose disdain for Cathedral City’s queer and Latino communities had been apparent through the 10 long winters of DeRosa’s ineffective mayoralty.
In his petulant diatribe, the incoming Mayor then proceeded to add insult to insult by declaring that he had supported Hooks’s candidacy, causing many in the rather flabbergasted audience to wonder why he had not had the courage of his convictions to move her appointment at the special council meeting held on December 10 to settle the issue of how to fill the fifth Council seat.
That sucking sound we all heard in Council Chambers yesterday was the sound of the community’s trust in Stan Henry and his mayoralty disappearing down the municipal commode.
The reaction of many of us in Cathedral City’s queer nation was one of great disappointment and sharp personal insult. When Stan Henry cruised to an unopposed election victory (not exactly a triumph of vigorous American democracy) for Mayor, he took office on a tide of goodwill. A city that had grown tired of the ten ineffective winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s ego-driven, sociopathic mayoralty greeted Stan Henry’s coming with a great deal of what now turns out to have been unrealistic anticipation. If Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s final months in office had played out like the senescence of the Ottoman Empire, we had hoped that Stan Henry might at least bring a little bit of the reforming energy of a Kemal Atatürk.
Instead of Kemal Atatürk, what we seem to have gotten is more like Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who infamously set his face against the very reforms that might have kept the Osmanlı Sultanate viable against a rising tide of irresistible demands for change.
Among the demands for change that crystallized during this last election cycle was for a Mayor and a city Council that would be more inclusive and more transparent. Both Cathedral City’s Latino community and its queer nation had grown tired of the way in which Kathleen DeRosa had tried to run things on behalf of and in the interest of a right-wing “Christian” constituency to whom she routinely and obsequiously pandered.
And because voters wanted change so much, they were prepared to give the new Mayor the benefit of a great deal of doubt. So eager were voters, in fact, to rid themselves of Kathleen DeRosa that they overlooked the fact that Mr. Henry had himself been a DeRosa protégé, as well as overlooking the fact that Mr. Henry was the only candidate on the mayoral ballot. Indeed, Mr. Henry had first joined the city Council following the 2012 election, when he, DeRosa, and former councilmember Charles “Bud” England ran as part of a DeRosa slate.
Indeed, DeRosa’s obvious intention in running such a slate had been to secure a permanent three vote majority on the Council, enabling her to run the city for the foreseeable future. However, as so often happens in criminal or political conspiracies, DeRosa’s plans undid themselves when Stan Henry knocked off Bud England, and left Stan Henry in an ideal position to put the shiv into DeRosa and take the mayoralty for himself.
It should not surprise us that the political soap opera in Cathedral City inevitably comes to resemble The Godfather meets I, Claudius, all set in Constantinople during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Cathedral City thus lends itself to becoming a hotbed of political intrigue, often carried out by politicians with no real skill therein.
But, unfortunately for Stan Henry, he made a rookie mistake by declaring rather public allegiance to the unsuccessful campaign of Theresa Hooks. Stan, to all intents and purposes, made it clear that not only does he not value the political support of the queer nation, but that he also, arguably, shares Hooks’s view that queerfolk are somehow “broken,” and need to be “fixed,” presumably by somehow praying our gay away.
In this blog, prior to the election, I noted that as a queer man, I don’t need anyone to pray my gay away, because I’m not broken and I don’t need fixing. My sexuality is an endowed state of being, and I believe to be part of God’s ineluctable plan for my destiny and the destiny of the world God created. I accept my orientation and I thank God for what I am, and I don’t need Theresa Hooks or Stan Henry preaching a political agenda which proclaims my brokenness and consequently insists that I and my queer sisters and brothers should be regarded in some way as second-class citizens in the Commonwealth. For the new mayor to demonize us in that fashion is a grave offense, one that will be very difficult to forgive.
Because Stan Henry saw fit to adopt the Theresa hooks narrative of blaming her electoral defeat on the queer nation, he broke trust with me, and I expect he has broken trust with an awful lot of other queerfolk in Cathedral City. If Stan Henry were so hot fired to put Theresa hooks on the Council, we may ask again why did he lack the courage to move her appointment at the December 10 meeting at which the issue was settled? If Stan Henry wants to blame queerfolk for his political ally not having been seated, then he has only himself to blame as and to the extent that queerfolk in Cathedral City do not see fit to give him the benefit of any doubt, or, even more tellingly, come to view him as little more than a pale political clone of his predecessor. If Stan Henry did not realize the growing weight and clout of a queer voting bloc in Cathedral City, and feels that he can insult us with impunity, then he has made yet another rookie mistake.
If Mr. Henry wants to try to regain the lost trust of so many of us in Cathedral City’s queer nation, he will need to proffer appropriate expressions of regret and contrition, and the Council, now with three gay members out of a total of five, will need to hold his feet to the fire, and will need to make clear that all five of them need to represent all 50,000-plus of us. Cathedral City’s queerfolk will be watching, and will expect the gay councilmembers to be more forthright in defense of the queer nation.
Trust is hard to earn, and Stan Henry made a rookie mistake by antagonizing the queer nation last night. One of my former colleagues predicted prior to the election the Stan Henry would be a one term mayor. I think my former colleague may well have been right. The queer nation has long memories, and those long memories are the collective custodian of all of the slights that have been visited upon us by ambitious, but maladroit, political operators like Stan Henry. We’ve come too far, fought too hard, lost too many, and put up with too much right wing bullshit to allow local politicians to insult us without cost.
-xxx-
Monday, December 1, 2014
IN DYING, WE LIVE: THOUGHTS ON WORLD AIDS DAY
Summary: It’s been a generation since the first ominous signs of the AIDS epidemic appeared among us. Since then, an entire queer generation has been born and come of age. The paradox of the AIDS epidemic has been that it not only forced the queer nation into an adult appreciation of the vagaries and uncertainties of life, but also into an adult willingness to participate in the ongoing life of the larger commonwealth of which we are an inescapable part. If Stonewall was our Lexington and Concord, the AIDS epidemic has been our Valley Forge, and out of it we have emerged battered but unbowed, scarred but unbroken, anguished yet tempered as in a refiner’s fire. In struggle we have overcome, and in dying we live.
On World AIDS Day, it’s hard to embrace the idea that since the AIDS crisis first emerged, an entire queer generation has been born, come of age, and assumed adult responsibilities, not just in the queer nation, but in the larger national community as a whole, all in a plague time.
Today, the mind travels back to July 3, 1981, to two concurrent newspaper items, one in the New York Times and the other in the Los Angeles Times, headlined “Rare Cancer Found in 41 Homosexuals.” To a boy in his teens, slowly coming to terms with his own non-normative sexuality, as I was that summer, these two articles hit me like Thomas Jefferson’s iconic “Firebell in the Night.” I had no empirical reason for doing so, but I nonetheless felt an inarticulable sense of dread come over me that I could not explain.
The history of the AIDS epidemic is too well known to require any extensive revisiting at this particular moment. But what is worth noting is that in those early days, the disease we now call AIDS was initially seen as an affliction peculiar to the gay community. Indeed, it was first referred to as GRID, or Gay Related Immune Disorder. Even today, while AIDS is an equal opportunity killer, the most serious effects of its visitation continue to be felt among heterosexuals in sub-Saharan Africa and among gay men in the industrialized nations of the West.
Because sub-Saharan black Africans and gay men have not historically been regarded as communities in which the rest of the world takes a great deal of interest, it’s not entirely surprising that AIDS should have been regarded as a somewhat exotic ailment happening to exotic people in exotic places. A generation ago, queerfolk were viewed as a kind of exotic subculture within American society. Exotic people like us only got weird and exotic diseases.
But in that intervening generation, queerfolk, particularly in the industrialized West, have made an astonishing transition from weird and exotic to quotidian and endotic. If, at the beginning of the 1980s, queerfolk were the kind of people to whom one did not necessarily want to “expose the children,” today we have become almost drearily respectable. We serve openly in Congress, in state legislatures, on county boards of supervisors, and city councils. We celebrate the Sacraments of our redemption, preach the Gospel, and solemnize the marriages of our straight neighbors. We live next door and make property values increase. In 35 American states Ruth can marry Naomi or Jonathan can tie the knot with David and the sky has not fallen. How far we have come in living memory since the days of Stonewall!
For if Stonewall was the queer nation’s Lexington and Concord, the AIDS crisis has been our Valley Forge. We learned how important it was to act up, to unleash power and to take purposeful steps to claim our rightful place as first-class citizens in the commonwealth. For the great paradox of the AIDS epidemic was that it forced us to emerge irrevocably from our collective social closet. The famous Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn once observed that he did not care what was said about him, as long as his name was spelled correctly. Like Goldwyn, the queer nation has come to a pragmatic understanding that that which gives us exposure and compels our straight neighbors to acknowledge our existence advances our cause.
And as we have emerged from the closet and made our inexorable way from the back of the bus to the driver’s seat, we have surmounted every hurdle our opponents have sought to raise against us. We have stormed and captured every citadel of exclusion, and as we have done so our endotic status has become an ineluctable fact of life. We have emerged battered but unbowed, scarred but unbroken, anguished yet tempered as in a refiner’s fire.
On World AIDS Day, we remember those whom we have lost, but we must also contemplate the paradox that in suffering we overcome; in dying, we live. By death, we, like Christ, have conquered death.
-xxx-
On World AIDS Day, it’s hard to embrace the idea that since the AIDS crisis first emerged, an entire queer generation has been born, come of age, and assumed adult responsibilities, not just in the queer nation, but in the larger national community as a whole, all in a plague time.
Today, the mind travels back to July 3, 1981, to two concurrent newspaper items, one in the New York Times and the other in the Los Angeles Times, headlined “Rare Cancer Found in 41 Homosexuals.” To a boy in his teens, slowly coming to terms with his own non-normative sexuality, as I was that summer, these two articles hit me like Thomas Jefferson’s iconic “Firebell in the Night.” I had no empirical reason for doing so, but I nonetheless felt an inarticulable sense of dread come over me that I could not explain.
The history of the AIDS epidemic is too well known to require any extensive revisiting at this particular moment. But what is worth noting is that in those early days, the disease we now call AIDS was initially seen as an affliction peculiar to the gay community. Indeed, it was first referred to as GRID, or Gay Related Immune Disorder. Even today, while AIDS is an equal opportunity killer, the most serious effects of its visitation continue to be felt among heterosexuals in sub-Saharan Africa and among gay men in the industrialized nations of the West.
Because sub-Saharan black Africans and gay men have not historically been regarded as communities in which the rest of the world takes a great deal of interest, it’s not entirely surprising that AIDS should have been regarded as a somewhat exotic ailment happening to exotic people in exotic places. A generation ago, queerfolk were viewed as a kind of exotic subculture within American society. Exotic people like us only got weird and exotic diseases.
But in that intervening generation, queerfolk, particularly in the industrialized West, have made an astonishing transition from weird and exotic to quotidian and endotic. If, at the beginning of the 1980s, queerfolk were the kind of people to whom one did not necessarily want to “expose the children,” today we have become almost drearily respectable. We serve openly in Congress, in state legislatures, on county boards of supervisors, and city councils. We celebrate the Sacraments of our redemption, preach the Gospel, and solemnize the marriages of our straight neighbors. We live next door and make property values increase. In 35 American states Ruth can marry Naomi or Jonathan can tie the knot with David and the sky has not fallen. How far we have come in living memory since the days of Stonewall!
For if Stonewall was the queer nation’s Lexington and Concord, the AIDS crisis has been our Valley Forge. We learned how important it was to act up, to unleash power and to take purposeful steps to claim our rightful place as first-class citizens in the commonwealth. For the great paradox of the AIDS epidemic was that it forced us to emerge irrevocably from our collective social closet. The famous Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn once observed that he did not care what was said about him, as long as his name was spelled correctly. Like Goldwyn, the queer nation has come to a pragmatic understanding that that which gives us exposure and compels our straight neighbors to acknowledge our existence advances our cause.
And as we have emerged from the closet and made our inexorable way from the back of the bus to the driver’s seat, we have surmounted every hurdle our opponents have sought to raise against us. We have stormed and captured every citadel of exclusion, and as we have done so our endotic status has become an ineluctable fact of life. We have emerged battered but unbowed, scarred but unbroken, anguished yet tempered as in a refiner’s fire.
On World AIDS Day, we remember those whom we have lost, but we must also contemplate the paradox that in suffering we overcome; in dying, we live. By death, we, like Christ, have conquered death.
-xxx-
Saturday, November 29, 2014
ANOTHER PRAVDA PUFF PIECE FROM THE DESERT SUN
Slavish, simpering, pandering, propagandistic, Pravda-like “personality journalism.”
These are about the kindest words one can use to describe the incredibly sycophantic coverage with which our local Gannett newspaper insulted the intelligence of its Cathedral City readers in its story this morning about the so-called legacy of outgoing “five-star” sociopath/Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa.
Certainly, the adulatory tone of baby reporter Sherry Barkas’s multiple column inch love-feast does nothing to allay a pervasive community suspicion that the Desert Sun has always given DeRosa softball, preferential coverage because DeRosa has gone out of her way to cultivate close, even meretricious, personal relationships with senior management at the newspaper.
Indeed, the Desert Sun has a long and dishonorable history of routinely assigning relatively inexperienced reporters to cover Cathedral City, reporters who don’t know their beat well enough not to be spoonfed whatever bullshit DeRosa ladles out to them. Indeed, we know of no other Coachella Valley mayor who, on leaving office, receives such uncritical, unthoughtful, unintelligent coverage. Reading this morning’s intelligence-insulting story put one in mind of reading Pravda or even Renmin Ribao’s hagiographic coverage of Mao Zedong during the worst cult-of-personality excesses of China’s cultural Revolution.
One may say that the intelligence of Cathedral City readers has been insulted because we all know much better than Ms. Barkas what is really happening in our community, a community which has been ill-served and ill led during the ten bitter winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s mayoralty. It is insulting to this community that the Desert Sun routinely assigns to it reporters who are so easily deceived and so lacking in the most basic knowledge of the beat they are supposed to cover. Case in point, Barkas’s puff piece does not even correctly recite the year in which DeRosa was first elected mayor, after having run a deceitful and dishonorable whispering campaign against her predecessor, George Stettler, an altogether honorable man.
Of course, not a word of DeRosa’s underhanded and deceitful propensities ever appears in The Desert Sun’s brown-nose coverage of her antics. Though it is common knowledge among Cathedral City voters that DeRosa had an epic October meltdown on social media, attempting to stir up a whispering campaign against (victorious) council candidate Mark Carnevale and darting anti-Semitic slurs in winning candidate Shelley Kaplan’s direction as well, The Desert Sun never informed its readers of what both readers and newspaper already knew and knew well. When DeRosa posted on Facebook that Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Carnevale were simply “bobble heads” for a long time councilmember and DeRosa nemesis Greg Pettis, her screed inevitably caused voters to be turned off on Theresa Hooks’s candidacy. Because DeRosa apparently couldn’t control her temper, it certainly appears that enough voters switched their votes to cost Theresa Hooks the election. With friends like Kathleen Joan DeRosa, apparently nobody needs enemies, yet the Desert Sun continues to cover for her.
It is hard to say which is more offensive, the almost quotidian untruths we have been told so often by the outgoing Mayor and her supporters, the casual disdain in which the outgoing mayor and her supporters hold Cathedral City’s Latino majority and its substantial queer nation, or the way in which the Desert Sun, a right-wing, racially biased news outlet, routinely carries the political water for this lame-duck incumbent, routinely dismissing all criticism of her poor performance and routinely attacking those of us who see through her.
I threw up a little in my mouth this morning reading this latest piece of puerile propaganda pandering. But, from the BS-purveyors at the Desert Sun we should not expect anything better.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
GIVING THANKS FOR SMALL MERCIES
Summary: litanies of things we are thankful for often become the stuff of treacly cliché, unworthy of any kind of serious consideration. Still, at a time when millions of Americans find themselves reeling in shock that yet another white guy gets away with shooting a black teen with impunity, we need to think of those small, incremental mercies for which we can legitimately give thanks. Here in our Desert, we can be thankful for the reelection of Representatives Raul Ruiz and Mark Takano. We can be thankful that California once again resisted the red Republican tide that the ineptitude and cowardice of the Democratic Party inflicted upon us. We can be thankful for a California Democratic Party that has balls and knows how to use them. We can be thankful for an incoming forward-looking Council majority in Cathedral City, and lastly, we who are queer can be enormously thankful for the astonishing progress of marriage equality in the last 11 months. Substantial additional work remains, but let us be thankful to God for those small, incremental mercies which make it possible to keep faith that the moral arc of the universe, however long, will bend toward justice.
Describing the things for which we are thankful at Thanksgiving Day has become rather a hackneyed trope. We like to talk about freedom, our gallant Armed Forces, the American way, and all manner of other bits of Imperial American statism. Most of our thanks litanies are treacly clichés, built on foundations of bullshit.
But, as Tip O’Neill famously remarked, all politics really is local. So the things for which I give thanks this year tend to be somewhat localized. In a world that is far too often a vast orb of disillusionment and pain, in a world where white cops can still get away with shooting black teenagers out of hand, and where we still find ourselves facing a moral imperative to cry for justice, I deliberately set my sights a little lower, thanking God for small mercies, for tiny charisms, for miniscule channels of grace that enable me to hold on, no matter how attenuated my grasp may be, to some small belief that things will work out.
Here in the desert, I can be thankful for certain political developments. I was very pleased that my friend Congressman Raul Ruiz was reelected by a fairly solid margin to the United States House of Representatives. As a gay man, I am equally pleased that my friend Congressman Mark Takano, the first gay man of color ever elected to the United States Congress, was also solidly reelected.
As much as I give thanks for the reelection of Representatives Ruiz and Takano, I’m also thankful that California once again defied the Republican red tide that seems to happen in midterm elections because the national Democratic Party seems too cowardly and inept to be able to run a victorious campaign. I’m not thankful that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is still chair of the Democratic National Committee. Nor am I thankful that the Democratic Party nationally and in an awful lot of states seems to have lost its faculty for fighting. It’s hard to be thankful when your political party goes into a crouch and soils itself and wets itself every time the Republican Party says so much as “boo.”
I am thankful that the California Democratic Party has balls. I’m thankful that the California Democratic Party continues to be a sufficiently powerful presence in the Golden State that Republican gubernatorial hopeful Neel Kashkari’s campaign was dead before it left the starting gate, and that we once again swept all eight of the statewide constitutional offices. I wish, however, that the California Democratic Party could simply step in and run the national party for a while, demonstrating to timorous Democrats inside the Beltway and in states where we should have won commandingly but lost, that there is actually a more testicular way to run a party. For years now, the Republican Party has presented The Democracy with gift after gift after gift, but our national party and too many state parties have been too cowardly and inept to unwrap those gifts and use them. So, I’m thankful for a California Democratic Party that really does have balls, that is unafraid, and that is willing to kick ass, take names, and send people to the hospital.
Closer to home, I give great thanks for the significant change in the personnel of the Cathedral City city council. After ten long winters of the ineffective mayoralty of Kathleen Joan DeRosa, DeRosa is leaving electoral politics in Cathedral City. I do not deny having been a strong, unsympathetic, and, I daresay, not inarticulate critic of a mayor whose performance rates, to all intents and purposes, an F-minus. In less than a week, a long Brezhnevesque period of municipal stagnation will come to an end. I look forward to being able to interact with a new mayor and council that will have a forward-looking majority.
Finally, and perhaps closest to home of all, I give thanks for the astonishing progress of marriage equality throughout the United States. Twenty-plus years ago I was one of the first attorneys in California to pursue a challenge to California’s then-statutory de facto marriage ban. While my clients and I were not successful in overturning California’s gender specific marriage statute, we did help catalyze a long national conversation about marriage, a conversation a professional colleague of mine suggested would take at least 20 years. To be able to use the phrase “his husband” or “her wife” and have it be more then just a bit of queer irony means more to me than I can say, because it means that millions of American queerfolk have been enabled to move forward toward the front of our national bus, to be accounted as truly first-class citizens in the body politic of the American Commonwealth.
So, at a time when we still have “substantial additional work” before us, Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, we may still give thanks for small, incremental mercies, even as we continue to bend the arc of our moral universe toward justice.
Describing the things for which we are thankful at Thanksgiving Day has become rather a hackneyed trope. We like to talk about freedom, our gallant Armed Forces, the American way, and all manner of other bits of Imperial American statism. Most of our thanks litanies are treacly clichés, built on foundations of bullshit.
But, as Tip O’Neill famously remarked, all politics really is local. So the things for which I give thanks this year tend to be somewhat localized. In a world that is far too often a vast orb of disillusionment and pain, in a world where white cops can still get away with shooting black teenagers out of hand, and where we still find ourselves facing a moral imperative to cry for justice, I deliberately set my sights a little lower, thanking God for small mercies, for tiny charisms, for miniscule channels of grace that enable me to hold on, no matter how attenuated my grasp may be, to some small belief that things will work out.
Here in the desert, I can be thankful for certain political developments. I was very pleased that my friend Congressman Raul Ruiz was reelected by a fairly solid margin to the United States House of Representatives. As a gay man, I am equally pleased that my friend Congressman Mark Takano, the first gay man of color ever elected to the United States Congress, was also solidly reelected.
As much as I give thanks for the reelection of Representatives Ruiz and Takano, I’m also thankful that California once again defied the Republican red tide that seems to happen in midterm elections because the national Democratic Party seems too cowardly and inept to be able to run a victorious campaign. I’m not thankful that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is still chair of the Democratic National Committee. Nor am I thankful that the Democratic Party nationally and in an awful lot of states seems to have lost its faculty for fighting. It’s hard to be thankful when your political party goes into a crouch and soils itself and wets itself every time the Republican Party says so much as “boo.”
I am thankful that the California Democratic Party has balls. I’m thankful that the California Democratic Party continues to be a sufficiently powerful presence in the Golden State that Republican gubernatorial hopeful Neel Kashkari’s campaign was dead before it left the starting gate, and that we once again swept all eight of the statewide constitutional offices. I wish, however, that the California Democratic Party could simply step in and run the national party for a while, demonstrating to timorous Democrats inside the Beltway and in states where we should have won commandingly but lost, that there is actually a more testicular way to run a party. For years now, the Republican Party has presented The Democracy with gift after gift after gift, but our national party and too many state parties have been too cowardly and inept to unwrap those gifts and use them. So, I’m thankful for a California Democratic Party that really does have balls, that is unafraid, and that is willing to kick ass, take names, and send people to the hospital.
Closer to home, I give great thanks for the significant change in the personnel of the Cathedral City city council. After ten long winters of the ineffective mayoralty of Kathleen Joan DeRosa, DeRosa is leaving electoral politics in Cathedral City. I do not deny having been a strong, unsympathetic, and, I daresay, not inarticulate critic of a mayor whose performance rates, to all intents and purposes, an F-minus. In less than a week, a long Brezhnevesque period of municipal stagnation will come to an end. I look forward to being able to interact with a new mayor and council that will have a forward-looking majority.
Finally, and perhaps closest to home of all, I give thanks for the astonishing progress of marriage equality throughout the United States. Twenty-plus years ago I was one of the first attorneys in California to pursue a challenge to California’s then-statutory de facto marriage ban. While my clients and I were not successful in overturning California’s gender specific marriage statute, we did help catalyze a long national conversation about marriage, a conversation a professional colleague of mine suggested would take at least 20 years. To be able to use the phrase “his husband” or “her wife” and have it be more then just a bit of queer irony means more to me than I can say, because it means that millions of American queerfolk have been enabled to move forward toward the front of our national bus, to be accounted as truly first-class citizens in the body politic of the American Commonwealth.
So, at a time when we still have “substantial additional work” before us, Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, we may still give thanks for small, incremental mercies, even as we continue to bend the arc of our moral universe toward justice.
Sunday, November 2, 2014
HEY THERESA! I'M NOT BROKEN AND I DON'T NEED TO BE FIXED!
Summary: Concerns have emerged in Cathedral City that city council candidate Theresa Hooks’s apparent support for reparative/conversion therapy for queerfolk may leave her unsuitable to serve as a councilmember in a community that is between one third and two fifths queer. Though Hooks’s views may be shared to some extent by outgoing five-star sociopath/mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa and presumptive incoming mayor Stanley Henry, we can’t afford to have a Council with a substantial anti-queer voting bloc among its membership. Do we queer residents of Cathedral City want a council that will attempt to reduce us to second-class citizenship in our own community? If that small contingent of Stockholm syndrome sufferers who form whatever nucleus of queer support Hooks may have are satisfied with such citizenship, then let them stand aside, for I think it is safe to say that the rest of the queer nation in Cathedral City may be unwilling to allow such dispensations to continue. Hooks does not get my vote, nor should she get the vote of any queer person or straight ally in Cathedral City.
Cathedral City’s electoral applecart may have been upset last week as concerns about council candidate Theresa Hooks’s anti-queer views became public when a constituent reported that Hooks had informed him that she supports conversion or “reparative” therapy for homosexuals.
Conversion/reparative therapy, banned in California and New Jersey as well as in a number of other western industrialized countries, seeks to “straighten out” the sexual orientation of gay and lesbian people. While not as primitive as overtly religious methodologies that purport to be able to “pray the gay away,” reparative or conversion therapy nonetheless sounds in a basic premise that somehow being gay or lesbian is “wrong,” and that because gayness or lesbianess represents a “broken” state of being, queerfolk need to be fixed.
The process by which Theresa Hooks’s support of conversion therapy came to light dates back to a letter to the editor authored Ms. Hooks and published in the September 23, 2006 edition of the Desert Sun, in which she defended Focus on the Family, an anti-gay hate group. The backstory of Hooks’s 2006 letter to the editor was that Focus on the Family had been sponsoring a so-called “ex-gay” conference here in the Coachella Valley, an action which unsurprisingly called forth expressions of significant disapproval not only from the Coachella Valley’s substantial queer community, but also from most right-thinking straight allies here in the desert.
The factual predicate for Hooks’s revelation has been set forth ad extenso in the Desert Sun, and I do not need to burden the record further recapitulating it here. What is notable is that no sooner had the issue of Hooks’s apparent support for reparative/conversion therapy become a subject of community knowledge than social media lit up with denunciations of both Hooks and of her political mentor, outgoing Cathedral City Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, whose disdain for Cathedral City’s substantial queer population is no secret, except to a few of her queer Stockholm syndrome sufferer supporters.
Indeed, Hooks’s apparent support for reparative/conversion therapy raises disturbing questions for Cathedral City’s queer nation. We know that DeRosa, Hooks, and presumptive incoming mayor Stanley Henry all tend to be members of the same political clique or faction within the community. DeRosa, an apostate from the Roman Catholic Church, has eagerly joined with Mr. Henry and with Hooks in embracing a conservative, evangelical, religious right approach to Christianity. Should Hooks’s apparent support for reparative/conversion therapy be a bellwether for what we might expect from the city Council were she, which God in His infinite mercy forbid, to be elected to that body?
For Stan Henry, the challenge will be simple. If Stan wants to be anything more than a one term mayor, he will need to get over an awful lot of the weltanschauung he brings with him to the mayoralty after a career spent in law enforcement. It is no secret that the so-called law enforcement community has traditionally tended to view itself as the curator, conservator, and custodian of what it considers ought to be “correct” social and cultural values. In the mindset of much of the law enforcement community, queerfolk represent a form of deviance against which the state ought to set its face. Because queerfolk represent deviance, and because we are cultural dissidents, law enforcement has often preferred to control queer cultural dissidence through “law and order” mechanisms. Can Stan Henry get past decades of experience in a profession in which viewing queerfolk as presumptive criminals is almost a part of the DNA?
But since Stan Henry is running unopposed for mayor, we will have to put him on notice and hold his feet to the fire, even if that means getting a hitherto relatively complacent queer community in Cathedral City far more active than it ever has been. We Cathedral City queerfolk have a lot of examples for what carefully modulated, carefully directed queer activism can accomplish, going right back to Stonewall, when the NYPD learned the hard way that you never get crossways with a drag queen. Having before us the precedent of Stonewall, and the precedent of the sustained political activism that first elected Harvey Milk and which at the same time helped call the City of West Hollywood into being, we Cathedral City queerfolk should stop worrying about recipes and handicrafts. We should stop eagerly chasing after a minute pearls of condescending concession from the likes of our outgoing sociopathic mayor. We should say no to the unbelievably cynical effort DeRosa, Hooks, and even Mr. Henry have set in train to turn Cathedral City into a “godly” community and put us uppity queers in our place as far to the back of the municipal bus as we can be shoved.
But as concerned as I am about the personal political ramifications of a DeRosa/Henry/Hooks political machine clanking into action in Cathedral City — for machines can always be taken down by those who have the courage to expose their corruption — I am even more disturbed by the possibility that reparative/conversion therapy might actually have a supporter in municipal government.
Because reparative/conversion therapy takes as its major premise the idea that queerfolk are somehow broken or defective, it necessarily follows in the view of supporters of reparative therapy that we queerfolk can change, and that if we can change, we should change, and that if we will not change voluntarily, then the power of the state, including the power of law enforcement, should be set in train against us to force us to change, and that if after all manner of constraint we will not change, then we should be physically eliminated from the body politic. At the risk of getting all Godwin on us, this prospect frightens me as badly as the coming of Hitler and the Nazis to power frightened a great many German Jews, and triggered an exodus of some of Germany’s greatest minds to the more congenial shores of the United Kingdom and the United States. As an out, loud, and proud gay man, in no need of being "repaired" by Theresa Hooks or anybody else, I find her position offensive, heretical, and un-American.
I don’t want to be made to feel unwelcome in a city that has been my home for almost two decades.
I don’t want to feel that if I call 911 in my own city, I will receive less service and less protection from my public safety agencies than would my straight neighbors.
I don’t want to feel, eleven years after Lawrence v. Texas, that my local police department has any room for an outlook or ideology that permits them to see me as some kind of criminal on account of the fact that as a gay man, I can, will, and do, have sex with men. (And some of those men have even been in law enforcement.)
I don’t want my municipal corporation to view me as a second-class stakeholder, and to ration public services to me on that basis.
All of these things are things that would be reasonably foreseeable realities were Theresa Hooks to be elected to the city Council in Cathedral City. This is not a prospect I find acceptable.
There will be some small number of queer Stockholm syndrome sufferers whom Hooks can bamboozle into supporting her. The rest of us queerfolk may not be so willing to give Theresa Hooks the benefit of the doubt. If a Hooks/Stanley voting bloc on the council seeks to engage in homophobic grandstanding, we must be out in force not only to ensure that Stanley Henry gets one term only as mayor, but also that Theresa Hooks leaves the Council as soon as possible, either at the end of her only term or by way of a recall.
-xxx-
Cathedral City’s electoral applecart may have been upset last week as concerns about council candidate Theresa Hooks’s anti-queer views became public when a constituent reported that Hooks had informed him that she supports conversion or “reparative” therapy for homosexuals.
Conversion/reparative therapy, banned in California and New Jersey as well as in a number of other western industrialized countries, seeks to “straighten out” the sexual orientation of gay and lesbian people. While not as primitive as overtly religious methodologies that purport to be able to “pray the gay away,” reparative or conversion therapy nonetheless sounds in a basic premise that somehow being gay or lesbian is “wrong,” and that because gayness or lesbianess represents a “broken” state of being, queerfolk need to be fixed.
The process by which Theresa Hooks’s support of conversion therapy came to light dates back to a letter to the editor authored Ms. Hooks and published in the September 23, 2006 edition of the Desert Sun, in which she defended Focus on the Family, an anti-gay hate group. The backstory of Hooks’s 2006 letter to the editor was that Focus on the Family had been sponsoring a so-called “ex-gay” conference here in the Coachella Valley, an action which unsurprisingly called forth expressions of significant disapproval not only from the Coachella Valley’s substantial queer community, but also from most right-thinking straight allies here in the desert.
The factual predicate for Hooks’s revelation has been set forth ad extenso in the Desert Sun, and I do not need to burden the record further recapitulating it here. What is notable is that no sooner had the issue of Hooks’s apparent support for reparative/conversion therapy become a subject of community knowledge than social media lit up with denunciations of both Hooks and of her political mentor, outgoing Cathedral City Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, whose disdain for Cathedral City’s substantial queer population is no secret, except to a few of her queer Stockholm syndrome sufferer supporters.
Indeed, Hooks’s apparent support for reparative/conversion therapy raises disturbing questions for Cathedral City’s queer nation. We know that DeRosa, Hooks, and presumptive incoming mayor Stanley Henry all tend to be members of the same political clique or faction within the community. DeRosa, an apostate from the Roman Catholic Church, has eagerly joined with Mr. Henry and with Hooks in embracing a conservative, evangelical, religious right approach to Christianity. Should Hooks’s apparent support for reparative/conversion therapy be a bellwether for what we might expect from the city Council were she, which God in His infinite mercy forbid, to be elected to that body?
For Stan Henry, the challenge will be simple. If Stan wants to be anything more than a one term mayor, he will need to get over an awful lot of the weltanschauung he brings with him to the mayoralty after a career spent in law enforcement. It is no secret that the so-called law enforcement community has traditionally tended to view itself as the curator, conservator, and custodian of what it considers ought to be “correct” social and cultural values. In the mindset of much of the law enforcement community, queerfolk represent a form of deviance against which the state ought to set its face. Because queerfolk represent deviance, and because we are cultural dissidents, law enforcement has often preferred to control queer cultural dissidence through “law and order” mechanisms. Can Stan Henry get past decades of experience in a profession in which viewing queerfolk as presumptive criminals is almost a part of the DNA?
But since Stan Henry is running unopposed for mayor, we will have to put him on notice and hold his feet to the fire, even if that means getting a hitherto relatively complacent queer community in Cathedral City far more active than it ever has been. We Cathedral City queerfolk have a lot of examples for what carefully modulated, carefully directed queer activism can accomplish, going right back to Stonewall, when the NYPD learned the hard way that you never get crossways with a drag queen. Having before us the precedent of Stonewall, and the precedent of the sustained political activism that first elected Harvey Milk and which at the same time helped call the City of West Hollywood into being, we Cathedral City queerfolk should stop worrying about recipes and handicrafts. We should stop eagerly chasing after a minute pearls of condescending concession from the likes of our outgoing sociopathic mayor. We should say no to the unbelievably cynical effort DeRosa, Hooks, and even Mr. Henry have set in train to turn Cathedral City into a “godly” community and put us uppity queers in our place as far to the back of the municipal bus as we can be shoved.
But as concerned as I am about the personal political ramifications of a DeRosa/Henry/Hooks political machine clanking into action in Cathedral City — for machines can always be taken down by those who have the courage to expose their corruption — I am even more disturbed by the possibility that reparative/conversion therapy might actually have a supporter in municipal government.
Because reparative/conversion therapy takes as its major premise the idea that queerfolk are somehow broken or defective, it necessarily follows in the view of supporters of reparative therapy that we queerfolk can change, and that if we can change, we should change, and that if we will not change voluntarily, then the power of the state, including the power of law enforcement, should be set in train against us to force us to change, and that if after all manner of constraint we will not change, then we should be physically eliminated from the body politic. At the risk of getting all Godwin on us, this prospect frightens me as badly as the coming of Hitler and the Nazis to power frightened a great many German Jews, and triggered an exodus of some of Germany’s greatest minds to the more congenial shores of the United Kingdom and the United States. As an out, loud, and proud gay man, in no need of being "repaired" by Theresa Hooks or anybody else, I find her position offensive, heretical, and un-American.
I don’t want to be made to feel unwelcome in a city that has been my home for almost two decades.
I don’t want to feel that if I call 911 in my own city, I will receive less service and less protection from my public safety agencies than would my straight neighbors.
I don’t want to feel, eleven years after Lawrence v. Texas, that my local police department has any room for an outlook or ideology that permits them to see me as some kind of criminal on account of the fact that as a gay man, I can, will, and do, have sex with men. (And some of those men have even been in law enforcement.)
I don’t want my municipal corporation to view me as a second-class stakeholder, and to ration public services to me on that basis.
All of these things are things that would be reasonably foreseeable realities were Theresa Hooks to be elected to the city Council in Cathedral City. This is not a prospect I find acceptable.
There will be some small number of queer Stockholm syndrome sufferers whom Hooks can bamboozle into supporting her. The rest of us queerfolk may not be so willing to give Theresa Hooks the benefit of the doubt. If a Hooks/Stanley voting bloc on the council seeks to engage in homophobic grandstanding, we must be out in force not only to ensure that Stanley Henry gets one term only as mayor, but also that Theresa Hooks leaves the Council as soon as possible, either at the end of her only term or by way of a recall.
-xxx-
Monday, October 13, 2014
WHOSE DAY? COLUMBUS DAY? DAY OF THE RACE? DAY OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES?
Summary: Every year at Columbus Day, we get our knickers in a knot. Should we embrace a breast-beating white liberal guilt posture of anguished handwringing and so-called political correctness, or should we fall back on the triumphalist Eurocentric narrative so many of us learned in school? The day long ago set aside to commemorate the first coming of Columbus to the New World has become an ongoing controversy. Whose day is it? Do we celebrate the exploring spirit or do we mourn for our First Peoples? Does the celebration of the one preclude sober reflection about the fate of the other? Columbus day is, and will always remain, a paradox.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Cathedral City, October 13, 2014– Today is Columbus Day, as officially observed. Sunday the 12th was traditional Columbus Day.
There is an ironic New Yorker Columbus Day cartoon of some notoriety depicting two American Indians standing in the underbrush by the shore of a Caribbean island. From three high-castled ships anchored offshore, boats are rowing toward the beach. In the lead boat, an explorer (presumably Columbus) stands, holding a flag. The caption of the cartoon has one Indian saying to the other something like “now might be a good time to review our immigration policies.”
The cartoon strikes us as funny because we know the history of the 500-plus years since Columbus’ arrival in the New World triggered the greatest völkerwanderung -a vast migration of peoples- in the recorded history of the world. Since then, millions of immigrants from all over the world have made their way to the Americas, and the history of their interaction with those who came before has been checkered at best. Yet, despite all the finger-wagging going on in some quarters, völkerwanderungen themselves are morally neutral phenomena.
Yet, in the last analysis, we all are descendants of immigrants from elsewhere, even Indians. If my white ancestors came here as part of the Atlantic migrations, my Indian ancestors arrived here tens, perhaps scores, of thousands of years ago, presumably across the Bering land bridge from Asia, and are still ultimately immigrants. The term “Native American” is thus something of a misnomer, a fact Canada recognizes by designating her Indians and Eskimos as “First Peoples.”
Still, by the time the first Europeans reached America -whenever that may have been, but certainly well before Columbus- the Indians of the Americas had established a lengthy tenure of occupation. The Americas were not -as generations of schoolchildren were once taught- an empty wilderness, but a landmass populated by a mass of humanity more diverse by far than Europe itself. By 1492, the social development of the Americas ranged from primitive hunter-gathering groups to complex state societies ranging from the mound-builder descendants of North America to the Aztecs of México, to the South American empire its Inca inhabitants called Tahuantinsuyu, the Four Quarters of the World.
Within two centuries, all of this had gone. The westward migration triggered by Columbus’ voyages had grown from trickle to flood. Wave after wave of migration, particularly to the settlement colonies of British North America, coupled with superior weapons technology (coupled with a disturbing European willingness to use it), superior agricultural and industrial technology, and the spread of European diseases -trivial childhood ailments to whites, fatal to unexposed Indians- tipped the balance decisively in favor of the pale invaders from across the water.
Thus the history, and thus the deeply conflicted emotions that swirl around any October 12 observance. Is it Columbus Day? Is it Dia de La Raza/Day of the Race? Is it Indigenous Peoples Day? Whatever one calls it, October 12 can be relied upon to pit the Sons of Italy celebrating one of their own against Native American groups calling attention to what has been called “half-a-millennium of resistance.” As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in that no-man’s-land to which moderates and truth-seekers -and indeed, most of us- are exiled. Do we celebrate the human achievement of the explorers and the immigrants, or do we weep for our Indian ancestors? Do we call attention to the evils the explorers so often brought in their wake, or do we celebrate the achievements of our First Forebears?
The answer is: all of the above. We cannot reverse the pragmatic sanction of history; the völkerwanderung that brought my European forebears to the Americans is as irreversible as that which brought my Indian ancestors to this place. The peoples have mixed too much to separate them; the rate of intermarriage among the Cherokee, for example, is close to 100 percent. Now is no longer an opportune time for the Indians in the underbrush of the New Yorker cartoon to discuss immigration policy. The invaders cannot be marched back onto their Naos and caravels and Mayflowers, their Susan Constants, their Godspeeds, and their Discoverys and packed back whence they came; their bones and the bones of their children have also become part of this land.
The invasion has been a success. Generations of interpenetration have produced a people that like mythic Coyote -the culture hero of many tribes- is one of shape-shifters. Millions of Americans carry the blood of both sides in their veins; millions of us are at once both the invading European and the resistant Indian. In a time of shape-shifting and mixing, Columbus Day, like Coyote, must be a shape-shifter. It must be an occasion for celebrating the nobility of the exploring spirit, but also for reflection on the duties we all owe to one another as common human inhabitants of the place we all call home.
As progressives, we must particularly be attuned on Columbus Day and every day to what our communities are telling us. We are a coalition -a movement- composed of communities and tribes and lineages of every sort and condition. We march with labor, but also support the right of Indians to be accounted as first class citizens of the commonwealth. We confess many faiths, and none at all. We acknowledge the right of many Americans of faith to oppose marriage equality within the context of their own churches, but we also insist that America’s queerfolk be treated as first class citizens, too. We embrace inclusiveness, knowing that ours is the harder choice and the nobler path, one from which the fearful of change turn away.
Columbus Day has become a paradox, laden with so many layers to deconstruct the debate will continue long after those currently engaged in it have passed out of this world. It is part of our larger American paradox, in which, as Babylon 5 writer J. Michael Straczynski once observed, "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, [and] the future frightens us...." Whose day is Columbus Day? It is our day, on which, perhaps more than on any other holiday, we need to reflect on who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is a pale, European-looking, attorney. He lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the City Council, for which he is running again. Thanks to an Act of Congress only a lawyer could love, and the fact that he lives on Indian leased land, his government considers him an Indian living on a Res. Go figure. The views herein are his own, not those of any jurisdiction, agency, entity, club, or other organization, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
This post is a revision of an earlier post published at this time last year. Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Cathedral City, October 13, 2014– Today is Columbus Day, as officially observed. Sunday the 12th was traditional Columbus Day.
There is an ironic New Yorker Columbus Day cartoon of some notoriety depicting two American Indians standing in the underbrush by the shore of a Caribbean island. From three high-castled ships anchored offshore, boats are rowing toward the beach. In the lead boat, an explorer (presumably Columbus) stands, holding a flag. The caption of the cartoon has one Indian saying to the other something like “now might be a good time to review our immigration policies.”
The cartoon strikes us as funny because we know the history of the 500-plus years since Columbus’ arrival in the New World triggered the greatest völkerwanderung -a vast migration of peoples- in the recorded history of the world. Since then, millions of immigrants from all over the world have made their way to the Americas, and the history of their interaction with those who came before has been checkered at best. Yet, despite all the finger-wagging going on in some quarters, völkerwanderungen themselves are morally neutral phenomena.
Yet, in the last analysis, we all are descendants of immigrants from elsewhere, even Indians. If my white ancestors came here as part of the Atlantic migrations, my Indian ancestors arrived here tens, perhaps scores, of thousands of years ago, presumably across the Bering land bridge from Asia, and are still ultimately immigrants. The term “Native American” is thus something of a misnomer, a fact Canada recognizes by designating her Indians and Eskimos as “First Peoples.”
Still, by the time the first Europeans reached America -whenever that may have been, but certainly well before Columbus- the Indians of the Americas had established a lengthy tenure of occupation. The Americas were not -as generations of schoolchildren were once taught- an empty wilderness, but a landmass populated by a mass of humanity more diverse by far than Europe itself. By 1492, the social development of the Americas ranged from primitive hunter-gathering groups to complex state societies ranging from the mound-builder descendants of North America to the Aztecs of México, to the South American empire its Inca inhabitants called Tahuantinsuyu, the Four Quarters of the World.
Within two centuries, all of this had gone. The westward migration triggered by Columbus’ voyages had grown from trickle to flood. Wave after wave of migration, particularly to the settlement colonies of British North America, coupled with superior weapons technology (coupled with a disturbing European willingness to use it), superior agricultural and industrial technology, and the spread of European diseases -trivial childhood ailments to whites, fatal to unexposed Indians- tipped the balance decisively in favor of the pale invaders from across the water.
Thus the history, and thus the deeply conflicted emotions that swirl around any October 12 observance. Is it Columbus Day? Is it Dia de La Raza/Day of the Race? Is it Indigenous Peoples Day? Whatever one calls it, October 12 can be relied upon to pit the Sons of Italy celebrating one of their own against Native American groups calling attention to what has been called “half-a-millennium of resistance.” As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in that no-man’s-land to which moderates and truth-seekers -and indeed, most of us- are exiled. Do we celebrate the human achievement of the explorers and the immigrants, or do we weep for our Indian ancestors? Do we call attention to the evils the explorers so often brought in their wake, or do we celebrate the achievements of our First Forebears?
The answer is: all of the above. We cannot reverse the pragmatic sanction of history; the völkerwanderung that brought my European forebears to the Americans is as irreversible as that which brought my Indian ancestors to this place. The peoples have mixed too much to separate them; the rate of intermarriage among the Cherokee, for example, is close to 100 percent. Now is no longer an opportune time for the Indians in the underbrush of the New Yorker cartoon to discuss immigration policy. The invaders cannot be marched back onto their Naos and caravels and Mayflowers, their Susan Constants, their Godspeeds, and their Discoverys and packed back whence they came; their bones and the bones of their children have also become part of this land.
The invasion has been a success. Generations of interpenetration have produced a people that like mythic Coyote -the culture hero of many tribes- is one of shape-shifters. Millions of Americans carry the blood of both sides in their veins; millions of us are at once both the invading European and the resistant Indian. In a time of shape-shifting and mixing, Columbus Day, like Coyote, must be a shape-shifter. It must be an occasion for celebrating the nobility of the exploring spirit, but also for reflection on the duties we all owe to one another as common human inhabitants of the place we all call home.
As progressives, we must particularly be attuned on Columbus Day and every day to what our communities are telling us. We are a coalition -a movement- composed of communities and tribes and lineages of every sort and condition. We march with labor, but also support the right of Indians to be accounted as first class citizens of the commonwealth. We confess many faiths, and none at all. We acknowledge the right of many Americans of faith to oppose marriage equality within the context of their own churches, but we also insist that America’s queerfolk be treated as first class citizens, too. We embrace inclusiveness, knowing that ours is the harder choice and the nobler path, one from which the fearful of change turn away.
Columbus Day has become a paradox, laden with so many layers to deconstruct the debate will continue long after those currently engaged in it have passed out of this world. It is part of our larger American paradox, in which, as Babylon 5 writer J. Michael Straczynski once observed, "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, [and] the future frightens us...." Whose day is Columbus Day? It is our day, on which, perhaps more than on any other holiday, we need to reflect on who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is a pale, European-looking, attorney. He lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the City Council, for which he is running again. Thanks to an Act of Congress only a lawyer could love, and the fact that he lives on Indian leased land, his government considers him an Indian living on a Res. Go figure. The views herein are his own, not those of any jurisdiction, agency, entity, club, or other organization, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
This post is a revision of an earlier post published at this time last year. Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
A TURD IN THE PUNCHBOWL FOR NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY
Summary: on National Coming Out Day, we may be thankful for our ability to be out in an America where our participation as out people in the American body politic is a lot more possible and a lot less perilous than it used to be, but we’d be fools not to realize that we have enemies, enemies who hate us, think us evil, consider our expressions of love to be infamous crimes against nature, and who would happily compass our vanishing under color of a proscription contained in the 18th chapter of Leviticus. We should remember how well integrated and domesticated Germany’s Jews were in 1933, and how quickly they were marginalized and reduced to pariah status. If it could happen in the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, it can happen here, too. The American right pursues a propaganda of fear against us, because it knows that fear leads to hate, hate leads to the Dark Side, and it is only by appealing to the darkest, most fundamentally warped, aspects of the American mind that the American right can ever hope to capture and retain political power.
Today is National Coming Out Day. It’s a time for those of us who are queer to be forthright about our queerness and to welcome to the ranks of out queer people other queer folk who have finally come round to acknowledging that they aren’t necessarily like the other girls or the other boys in the neighborhood.
It’s a time for honesty, and for having the hardihood to acknowledge a reality that still makes an awful lot of straight people’s heads explode.
But today, at the acknowledged risk of being flamed to a well done crisp by the quick-to-judge and the psychologically needy, I do need to take a bit of a dump in the punch bowl.
First, let’s stipulate that we have come astonishingly far, astonishingly fast. In my own lifetime, the queer nation has advanced from the status of an unspeakably perverse and presumptively criminal subculture (tinged about with a generous dash of the exotic)) to constituting a “Footnote Four” minority, bourgeois, legal, thoroughly domesticated, and essentially endotic.
To all intents and purposes, we queerfolk have come to occupy a structural position in American society not dissimilar to that of the Jewish community. It is a not infelicitous observation, and one that has been made by a number of queer, and Jewish, commentators over the years.
But let’s get a little more specific about the analogy. It’s not just that we occupy the kind of position that can give rise to screaming diatribes from the likes of anti-Semitic, homophobic louts like Mel Gibson, who tends to echo of not uncommon trope about “Hollywood” ostensibly being controlled by a dangerous group of illuminati composed of Jews and homosexuals. (Full disclosure: I remember several very pleasurable nights spent in the company of a Jewish homosexual intellectual (Horrors!), to whom I am indebted for some of the thinking behind these remarks.)
In fact, we may analogize the position of queerfolk in early 21st century American society to the position of Jews in early 20th century, Wilhelmine Imperial Germany. At the time, Imperial Germany’s Jews were, for the most part, tolerably well integrated and assimilated into German society. Most of the grosser and cruder forms of invidious anti-Semitic discrimination had largely been done away with. While Germany’s Imperial Navy still held out against admitting Jewish officers, the armies of the various German states had largely abrogated such prohibitions.
German Jews could be found in almost every level of society, from such hofjuden (Court Jews) as Albert Ballin, the great impresario of the Hamburg-America shipping line, down to provincial doctors, lawyers, and industrial workers. For the average German Gentile, the presence of Jews in German society was simply not strange.
Yet, anti-Semitism continued to be a powerful subterranean force in German and Austro-Hungarian politics. It still remained perfectly respectable in some quarters for political rabble-rousers to throw their base the red meat of appeals to hatred against “the Jew.” Vienna Mayor Karl Lueger, who has been credited with the transformation of the Austrian capital into a modern city, nonetheless espoused a politics compounded in equal measure of populism and a kind of “gemütlich anti-Semitism.” Lueger’s anti-Semitism has been credited, if you will, with informing the anti-Semitic views of a sometime Vienna resident who went on to pursue a more profitable political career in Germany, Adolf Hitler.
Nonetheless, anti-Semitism notwithstanding, the Jews of Germany and Austria, integrated as they were, prospered under the Imperial regimes of Hohenzollern and Habsburg. Indeed, in addition to such hofjuden as Albert Ballin, both Germany and Austria produced a bumper crop of Jews whose work has enlarged the frontiers of the human mind and elevated the tone of the human intellect. Names such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, along with less well-known personages such as Austro-Hungarian naval architect Siegfried Popper, attest to the vibrancy of Jewish intellectual life in the German-speaking countries at the turn of the 20th century.
But after the Great War, and during the Weimarzeit, the crazies began to mainstream themselves into the body politic of the Weimar Republic. Tragically, far too many Germans, both Jewish and Gentile, wrote off Hitler and his National Socialist movement as nothing more than a group of fringe whack jobs, composed of the dregs of German society.
The appalling complacency of much of German society, cultured, educated, civilized, Christian in the best sense of that office-maligned word, in the face of the emergent Nazi terror is an historical phenomenon that may never be adequately explained. German society was either swept up or swept away by the Nazis.
“It cannot possibly happen here in Germany,” the so-called good Germans said to themselves. “This is a civilized country, the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller. Hitler and his guttersnipes will never prevail against the basic decency of the German people.”
But Hitler and his guttersnipes did prevail.
The country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, became the country of Dachau, of Auschwitz-Birkenau, of the Warsaw ghetto and the Totenkopf killing teams. The country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, became the country the civilized world had to put down. To borrow the words of a Franquista officer commenting on the bombing of Guernica, “Germany was bombed. We bombed it and bombed it and bombed it, ¿y si por qué no?”
So, you ask, why take time to obsess over the tragic fate of Germany’s Jews? The answer could not be more simple. We queerfolk are in a position so closely analogous to that of Germany’s Jews in 1914 that it deprives this queer man of sleep at night.
What keeps me awake in the darkness is my consideration of the fact that while we are relatively well integrated into society, while we, like our neighbors in the Jewish community, are often seen as exerting an influence on the culture disproportionate to and incommensurate with our numbers, and, while we, like our Jewish neighbors, tend to feel safer here than in other, more retrograde societies, our status in the American body politic is still highly contingent, highly iffy.
I’ll concede that we have come quite a way from being on more or less perpetual probation, as we were just two decades ago. We don’t see our local Gannett newspaper clutching its institutional pearls over the idea of a “drag queen night” at our local minor-league ballpark, the way it did back in 1997, when it openly agonized about whether children should be “exposed to such conduct.” We don’t see an awful lot of people in our Pleasant Desert getting themselves into knicker-knotting swivets over the prospect of Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David getting themselves hitched over at the Palm Springs Courthouse.
But while the Coachella Valley, or at least parts of it, may be a queer-friendly oasis, all one needs to do is fire up the Internet to see that the same kind of poisonous hatred which once fueled the wicked mind of Adolf Hitler and his fellow anti-Semites continues to bubble away. While naked and unapologetic anti-Semitism has come to be regarded in this country as unacceptable and un-American, no such constraints exist with respect to the nastiest and most unapologetic homophobia.
When the official position of one of our major political parties is that queerfolk should not enjoy the full panoply of rights and protections that are the natural birthright of every American, when politicians of that party routinely throw anti-queer red meat to their far right base, and when screamers like Brian Brown of the so-called National Organization for Marriage, Matthew Staver of the so-called Alliance Defending Freedom, and outright eliminationists such as Scott Lively (father of the Uganda “Kill the Gays” Bill) and right-wing radio blowhard Brian Fischer of the so-called American Family Association, and when Princes of the Roman church such as Raymond Cardinal Burke describe us as intrinsically disordered and evil, we may justifiably conclude that complacency is not a luxury in which we have any justifiable reason to traffic.
Because as long as it is ever considered respectable or even permissible to traffic in the kind of rhetoric that is routinely deployed against queerfolk by the Republican Party and its fellow travelers, we are in the most exquisite danger. For this is the same kind of rhetoric that was used in Germany to whip up the hatred of the population against “The Jew.”
And in the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, it took less than three years following Hitler’s rise to power in January, 1933 for the Nazi party to put into force the so-called Nuremberg Laws which were designed to eliminate Jews from German society. Our own recent history should tell us that electorates throughout the United States are perfectly capable of adopting their own Nuremberg Laws.
It happened here in California with Proposition 22 and again with Proposition 8. In state after state, right-wing operatives were able to convince electorates to write marriage bans into their state constitutions, all to make sure the uppity queers fled back into the closet or, failing that, were reduced to huddling at the back of the metaphorical bus.
And if it took Germany only three years to reduce an integral component of her population from first-class status to pariahs, can we seriously imagine that it can’t happen here? Of course it can happen here. Sinclair Lewis once famously observed that fascism would come to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. Actually, fascism will come to America wrapped in a do-rag and wearing a T-shirt (made in a Chinese or Bangladeshi sweatshop) emblazoned with the American flag and inscribed “Straight Pride.”
Memory is the custodian of all our horrors, and we queerfolk need to remember the horrors of 20th century German history a lot more than we have done. Because if it happened in the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, it sure as hell can happen in the country of Jefferson, of Lincoln, of the Roosevelts and Harry Truman, of the Kennedys, and even of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our straight neighbors have demonstrated how easily they can be bamboozled, and how easily their unease about we who love differently can be turned into ravening hatred. We should never fool ourselves that there is not a dark side of the American mind that can easily be led to enthusiastic adoption of all the eliminationist horrors we have seen in the Old World.
It may seem trite to quote a Jedi Master who exists only as pixels, but Yoda was right: fear leads to hate, and hate leads to the Dark Side.
Queerfolk, “be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8.
Happy National Coming Out Day.
Today is National Coming Out Day. It’s a time for those of us who are queer to be forthright about our queerness and to welcome to the ranks of out queer people other queer folk who have finally come round to acknowledging that they aren’t necessarily like the other girls or the other boys in the neighborhood.
It’s a time for honesty, and for having the hardihood to acknowledge a reality that still makes an awful lot of straight people’s heads explode.
But today, at the acknowledged risk of being flamed to a well done crisp by the quick-to-judge and the psychologically needy, I do need to take a bit of a dump in the punch bowl.
First, let’s stipulate that we have come astonishingly far, astonishingly fast. In my own lifetime, the queer nation has advanced from the status of an unspeakably perverse and presumptively criminal subculture (tinged about with a generous dash of the exotic)) to constituting a “Footnote Four” minority, bourgeois, legal, thoroughly domesticated, and essentially endotic.
To all intents and purposes, we queerfolk have come to occupy a structural position in American society not dissimilar to that of the Jewish community. It is a not infelicitous observation, and one that has been made by a number of queer, and Jewish, commentators over the years.
But let’s get a little more specific about the analogy. It’s not just that we occupy the kind of position that can give rise to screaming diatribes from the likes of anti-Semitic, homophobic louts like Mel Gibson, who tends to echo of not uncommon trope about “Hollywood” ostensibly being controlled by a dangerous group of illuminati composed of Jews and homosexuals. (Full disclosure: I remember several very pleasurable nights spent in the company of a Jewish homosexual intellectual (Horrors!), to whom I am indebted for some of the thinking behind these remarks.)
In fact, we may analogize the position of queerfolk in early 21st century American society to the position of Jews in early 20th century, Wilhelmine Imperial Germany. At the time, Imperial Germany’s Jews were, for the most part, tolerably well integrated and assimilated into German society. Most of the grosser and cruder forms of invidious anti-Semitic discrimination had largely been done away with. While Germany’s Imperial Navy still held out against admitting Jewish officers, the armies of the various German states had largely abrogated such prohibitions.
German Jews could be found in almost every level of society, from such hofjuden (Court Jews) as Albert Ballin, the great impresario of the Hamburg-America shipping line, down to provincial doctors, lawyers, and industrial workers. For the average German Gentile, the presence of Jews in German society was simply not strange.
Yet, anti-Semitism continued to be a powerful subterranean force in German and Austro-Hungarian politics. It still remained perfectly respectable in some quarters for political rabble-rousers to throw their base the red meat of appeals to hatred against “the Jew.” Vienna Mayor Karl Lueger, who has been credited with the transformation of the Austrian capital into a modern city, nonetheless espoused a politics compounded in equal measure of populism and a kind of “gemütlich anti-Semitism.” Lueger’s anti-Semitism has been credited, if you will, with informing the anti-Semitic views of a sometime Vienna resident who went on to pursue a more profitable political career in Germany, Adolf Hitler.
Nonetheless, anti-Semitism notwithstanding, the Jews of Germany and Austria, integrated as they were, prospered under the Imperial regimes of Hohenzollern and Habsburg. Indeed, in addition to such hofjuden as Albert Ballin, both Germany and Austria produced a bumper crop of Jews whose work has enlarged the frontiers of the human mind and elevated the tone of the human intellect. Names such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, along with less well-known personages such as Austro-Hungarian naval architect Siegfried Popper, attest to the vibrancy of Jewish intellectual life in the German-speaking countries at the turn of the 20th century.
But after the Great War, and during the Weimarzeit, the crazies began to mainstream themselves into the body politic of the Weimar Republic. Tragically, far too many Germans, both Jewish and Gentile, wrote off Hitler and his National Socialist movement as nothing more than a group of fringe whack jobs, composed of the dregs of German society.
The appalling complacency of much of German society, cultured, educated, civilized, Christian in the best sense of that office-maligned word, in the face of the emergent Nazi terror is an historical phenomenon that may never be adequately explained. German society was either swept up or swept away by the Nazis.
“It cannot possibly happen here in Germany,” the so-called good Germans said to themselves. “This is a civilized country, the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller. Hitler and his guttersnipes will never prevail against the basic decency of the German people.”
But Hitler and his guttersnipes did prevail.
The country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, became the country of Dachau, of Auschwitz-Birkenau, of the Warsaw ghetto and the Totenkopf killing teams. The country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, became the country the civilized world had to put down. To borrow the words of a Franquista officer commenting on the bombing of Guernica, “Germany was bombed. We bombed it and bombed it and bombed it, ¿y si por qué no?”
So, you ask, why take time to obsess over the tragic fate of Germany’s Jews? The answer could not be more simple. We queerfolk are in a position so closely analogous to that of Germany’s Jews in 1914 that it deprives this queer man of sleep at night.
What keeps me awake in the darkness is my consideration of the fact that while we are relatively well integrated into society, while we, like our neighbors in the Jewish community, are often seen as exerting an influence on the culture disproportionate to and incommensurate with our numbers, and, while we, like our Jewish neighbors, tend to feel safer here than in other, more retrograde societies, our status in the American body politic is still highly contingent, highly iffy.
I’ll concede that we have come quite a way from being on more or less perpetual probation, as we were just two decades ago. We don’t see our local Gannett newspaper clutching its institutional pearls over the idea of a “drag queen night” at our local minor-league ballpark, the way it did back in 1997, when it openly agonized about whether children should be “exposed to such conduct.” We don’t see an awful lot of people in our Pleasant Desert getting themselves into knicker-knotting swivets over the prospect of Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David getting themselves hitched over at the Palm Springs Courthouse.
But while the Coachella Valley, or at least parts of it, may be a queer-friendly oasis, all one needs to do is fire up the Internet to see that the same kind of poisonous hatred which once fueled the wicked mind of Adolf Hitler and his fellow anti-Semites continues to bubble away. While naked and unapologetic anti-Semitism has come to be regarded in this country as unacceptable and un-American, no such constraints exist with respect to the nastiest and most unapologetic homophobia.
When the official position of one of our major political parties is that queerfolk should not enjoy the full panoply of rights and protections that are the natural birthright of every American, when politicians of that party routinely throw anti-queer red meat to their far right base, and when screamers like Brian Brown of the so-called National Organization for Marriage, Matthew Staver of the so-called Alliance Defending Freedom, and outright eliminationists such as Scott Lively (father of the Uganda “Kill the Gays” Bill) and right-wing radio blowhard Brian Fischer of the so-called American Family Association, and when Princes of the Roman church such as Raymond Cardinal Burke describe us as intrinsically disordered and evil, we may justifiably conclude that complacency is not a luxury in which we have any justifiable reason to traffic.
Because as long as it is ever considered respectable or even permissible to traffic in the kind of rhetoric that is routinely deployed against queerfolk by the Republican Party and its fellow travelers, we are in the most exquisite danger. For this is the same kind of rhetoric that was used in Germany to whip up the hatred of the population against “The Jew.”
And in the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, it took less than three years following Hitler’s rise to power in January, 1933 for the Nazi party to put into force the so-called Nuremberg Laws which were designed to eliminate Jews from German society. Our own recent history should tell us that electorates throughout the United States are perfectly capable of adopting their own Nuremberg Laws.
It happened here in California with Proposition 22 and again with Proposition 8. In state after state, right-wing operatives were able to convince electorates to write marriage bans into their state constitutions, all to make sure the uppity queers fled back into the closet or, failing that, were reduced to huddling at the back of the metaphorical bus.
And if it took Germany only three years to reduce an integral component of her population from first-class status to pariahs, can we seriously imagine that it can’t happen here? Of course it can happen here. Sinclair Lewis once famously observed that fascism would come to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. Actually, fascism will come to America wrapped in a do-rag and wearing a T-shirt (made in a Chinese or Bangladeshi sweatshop) emblazoned with the American flag and inscribed “Straight Pride.”
Memory is the custodian of all our horrors, and we queerfolk need to remember the horrors of 20th century German history a lot more than we have done. Because if it happened in the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, it sure as hell can happen in the country of Jefferson, of Lincoln, of the Roosevelts and Harry Truman, of the Kennedys, and even of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our straight neighbors have demonstrated how easily they can be bamboozled, and how easily their unease about we who love differently can be turned into ravening hatred. We should never fool ourselves that there is not a dark side of the American mind that can easily be led to enthusiastic adoption of all the eliminationist horrors we have seen in the Old World.
It may seem trite to quote a Jedi Master who exists only as pixels, but Yoda was right: fear leads to hate, and hate leads to the Dark Side.
Queerfolk, “be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8.
Happy National Coming Out Day.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
A DEALBREAKER ANSWER AND A BROWN ACT VIOLATION: NOT YOUR TYPICAL CANDIDATE FORUM.
Summary: last night’s Cathedral City candidates’ forum provided two interesting spectacles. First, candidate Theresa Hooks, the designated heiress of outgoing lame-duck Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, managed to disqualify herself by one simple response to a question posed to her. Second, the media moderator and media panelists, who clearly had not done their due diligence, managed to lead every single candidate into a violation of the Ralph M. Brown Act, California’s 65-year-old open meeting law. While many low information residents and voters may not have noticed, a number of us who were in the audience were clearly aware of what happened.
Candidate fora tend to be much of a muchness, often stupefyingly boring repetitions of platitudes, pablum, and canned talking points. Few, if any, truly undecided voters actually have their minds made up by what they see or hear at a candidate forum. To that extent, candidate fora are largely exercises in marketing the message to the base and providing useful soundbites that can be quoted in the local media. It’s rare under such circumstances that a candidate disqualifies herself by giving an answer that turns out to be a complete dealbreaker, but sometimes it happens. It happened last night with Theresa Hooks.
As rare as it is for a candidate to disqualify herself with one single response, it’s also rare for a moderator and the media panel to manage to lead the candidates into a fairly serious violation of California’s open meeting law, but both such events occurred at last night’s Cathedral City candidates’ forum.
Candidate Theresa Hooks managed to disqualify herself by her dealbreaker response to a question to all the candidates whether a candidate’s or councilmember’s private financial affairs were a legitimate subject of public scrutiny and comment. Candidates Fausto Ascencio, Mark Carnevale, Sergio Espericueta, Shelley Kaplan, and Gordon McGinnis all said “no.” Hooks said “yes.”
Hooks’s response was exactly the sort of response one should expect from a mentor and essential political clone of outgoing lame-duck Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa. DeRosa has a reputation for prying into the private financial affairs of her political rivals and then spoon feeding that information to credulous reporters at the Desert Sun with a generous dose of spin intended to harm whichever political rival has been targeted.
In the spring of 2013, DeRosa spoonfed sometime Desert Sun reporter Tamara Sone a whole series of private financial tidbits about councilmember Greg Pettis. With DeRosa’s assistance, Sone (who had some significant financial skeletons in her own closet, skeletons which later led to the reporter’s swift and unceremonious departure from the employ of the Desert Sun.) produced a breathless hatchet piece essentially accusing the long-serving councilmember of all manner of financial improprieties.
Yet, no evidence has ever emerged to corroborate many of the more outlandish inferences and assumptions contained in that article. Moreover, by failing to follow the traditional two-source rule, and by failing to vet some of the more obvious lies told to her by DeRosa and by former Councilman Charles “Bud” England, Sone managed to produce an article that was tainted by, to use the Supreme Court’s language from its New York Times v. Sullivan opinion, “actual malice” and “reckless disregard for the truth.”
By suggesting that a candidate’s or councilmember’s private financials are a legitimate subject of public scrutiny, Hooks also implies that a candidate’s or councilmember’s financials should also be available to such a person’s political rivals. Clearly, Hooks is playing from Kathleen DeRosa’s playbook, looking for an opportunity to try to dig up some dirt on potential council rivals and use it against them.
As noted before, Hooks’s position is disqualifying. It is disqualifying because it is exactly the position taken by one of the most unethical and divisive mayors in Cathedral City’s history, Kathleen Joan DeRosa. DeRosa has a long history of trying to dig in to the private lives of those who she considers enemies, and to spoon feed whatever unflattering information she can find to overly credulous and inexperienced reporters for our local Gannett newspaper, which has always been unseemly eager to carry her water.
We cannot afford to have a councilmember following in Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s unethical footsteps.
We cannot afford to have a councilmember who believes that it’s okay to use private information to try to blackmail her political rivals or embarrass them with a view to diminishing their effectiveness in local or regional public service.
We cannot afford to have a councilmember who will predictably hold others to much higher standards than she holds herself.
Moreover, Hooks’s willingness to play a rather cynical gender card, proclaiming that inasmuch as she is the only woman in the race, voters should select her XX chromosome rather than selecting a more qualified holder of XY chromosomes, is clearly designed to appeal to two kinds of voters. First, it is intended to seal the deal with the right wing Christian base which she has inherited from DeRosa. Second, it is clearly intended to play to the white liberal guilt of otherwise progressive voters who may not be well informed about Theresa Hooks’s unfortunate record of bigotry and homophobia.
Indeed, Ms. Hooks’s position with respect to Cathedral City’s substantial queer community is rather clear. She does not much care for us, and would doubtless prefer to see us vanish. Indeed, in a breathless letter to the editor of the Desert Sun dated September 23, 2006, Hooks came eagerly to the defense of Focus on the Family, an anti-gay hate group, quoting the Genesis “male and female” creation narrative to justify discrimination against LGBT people.
Someone who is willing to be guided by Kathleen DeRosa’s political playbook to the extent of being willing to use financial information to harm her political rivals, and who is as obviously unfriendly to queerfolk as Theresa Hooks, is simply not the right choice for our city Council.
But if Theresa Hooks is the wrong choice for our Council and showed it last night, we may also fault the moderator and media panel at last night’s debate for creating a serious and obvious Brown Act violation.
California’s open meeting law, the Ralph M. Brown Act of 1949, forbids members of an elected body from reaching prior or advance consensus as to action outside of the context of duly noticed public meetings. A quorum or majority of a council or of a governing board may not get together, either directly, through intermediaries, or through communications such as telephone calls or emails, to arrive at what amounts to a pre-consensus before a formal public meeting is held and a decision is taken in the open where the public can see it and hold its representatives accountable. The Brown Act also applies to candidates. Liability under the Act attaches to both declared and qualified candidates.
Thus, last night, when one of the panel asked the candidates how each candidate intended to proceed when filling the Council seat Stan Henry will vacate when he becomes mayor, and each candidate expressed his or her intention, a potential quorum of the new council effectively had a meeting to decide a course of action well outside of what the Brown Act defines as permissible. Each candidate, by participating, violated the Act, and the media panelists and moderator Brooke Beare (from the local CBS affiliate,) made themselves accessories the violation. Now, it may be the candidates were legitimately unaware of the provisions of the Act, not having been educated as to its provisions and requirements.
I do not know whether, on the unbelievably lackluster watch of the current mayor, Cathedral City has abandoned its former practice of providing some basic orientation to Council candidates about the responsibilities under California’s political ethics laws, but I do remember that during my own victorious council campaign in 2002, I received just such an orientation. Had I been a candidate at a forum at which such a question was asked, I would have respectfully declined to answer on the grounds that the Brown Act was being violated.
Of course, when I brought the issue up to the panelists and the moderator after the forum, I was pooh-poohed. Nobody likes to have their egregious errors pointed out to them, even by somebody who does so politely. Perhaps my next step may well be to bring this matter to the attention of the District Attorney. After all, the Brown Act has been with us since 1949, and after 65 years, there is simply no good reason why debate moderators or panelists should not be aware of the rather stringent requirements of the Act and conform their conduct to it.
The rule of law suffers when it is ignored, as it has been too often in Cathedral City of late. I don’t think Theresa Hooks has the first idea of what the rule of law is, or she would not be so eager to go digging into the private lives of her political rivals, trying to find the same kind of dirt on them that her political mentor, Kathleen Joan DeRosa, has been trying to find on the numerous people in Cathedral City she considers enemies.
I know whom I will support in this election, I also know whom I will not, and Theresa Hooks is at the top of my “do not support” list.
Candidate fora tend to be much of a muchness, often stupefyingly boring repetitions of platitudes, pablum, and canned talking points. Few, if any, truly undecided voters actually have their minds made up by what they see or hear at a candidate forum. To that extent, candidate fora are largely exercises in marketing the message to the base and providing useful soundbites that can be quoted in the local media. It’s rare under such circumstances that a candidate disqualifies herself by giving an answer that turns out to be a complete dealbreaker, but sometimes it happens. It happened last night with Theresa Hooks.
As rare as it is for a candidate to disqualify herself with one single response, it’s also rare for a moderator and the media panel to manage to lead the candidates into a fairly serious violation of California’s open meeting law, but both such events occurred at last night’s Cathedral City candidates’ forum.
Candidate Theresa Hooks managed to disqualify herself by her dealbreaker response to a question to all the candidates whether a candidate’s or councilmember’s private financial affairs were a legitimate subject of public scrutiny and comment. Candidates Fausto Ascencio, Mark Carnevale, Sergio Espericueta, Shelley Kaplan, and Gordon McGinnis all said “no.” Hooks said “yes.”
Hooks’s response was exactly the sort of response one should expect from a mentor and essential political clone of outgoing lame-duck Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa. DeRosa has a reputation for prying into the private financial affairs of her political rivals and then spoon feeding that information to credulous reporters at the Desert Sun with a generous dose of spin intended to harm whichever political rival has been targeted.
In the spring of 2013, DeRosa spoonfed sometime Desert Sun reporter Tamara Sone a whole series of private financial tidbits about councilmember Greg Pettis. With DeRosa’s assistance, Sone (who had some significant financial skeletons in her own closet, skeletons which later led to the reporter’s swift and unceremonious departure from the employ of the Desert Sun.) produced a breathless hatchet piece essentially accusing the long-serving councilmember of all manner of financial improprieties.
Yet, no evidence has ever emerged to corroborate many of the more outlandish inferences and assumptions contained in that article. Moreover, by failing to follow the traditional two-source rule, and by failing to vet some of the more obvious lies told to her by DeRosa and by former Councilman Charles “Bud” England, Sone managed to produce an article that was tainted by, to use the Supreme Court’s language from its New York Times v. Sullivan opinion, “actual malice” and “reckless disregard for the truth.”
By suggesting that a candidate’s or councilmember’s private financials are a legitimate subject of public scrutiny, Hooks also implies that a candidate’s or councilmember’s financials should also be available to such a person’s political rivals. Clearly, Hooks is playing from Kathleen DeRosa’s playbook, looking for an opportunity to try to dig up some dirt on potential council rivals and use it against them.
As noted before, Hooks’s position is disqualifying. It is disqualifying because it is exactly the position taken by one of the most unethical and divisive mayors in Cathedral City’s history, Kathleen Joan DeRosa. DeRosa has a long history of trying to dig in to the private lives of those who she considers enemies, and to spoon feed whatever unflattering information she can find to overly credulous and inexperienced reporters for our local Gannett newspaper, which has always been unseemly eager to carry her water.
We cannot afford to have a councilmember following in Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s unethical footsteps.
We cannot afford to have a councilmember who believes that it’s okay to use private information to try to blackmail her political rivals or embarrass them with a view to diminishing their effectiveness in local or regional public service.
We cannot afford to have a councilmember who will predictably hold others to much higher standards than she holds herself.
Moreover, Hooks’s willingness to play a rather cynical gender card, proclaiming that inasmuch as she is the only woman in the race, voters should select her XX chromosome rather than selecting a more qualified holder of XY chromosomes, is clearly designed to appeal to two kinds of voters. First, it is intended to seal the deal with the right wing Christian base which she has inherited from DeRosa. Second, it is clearly intended to play to the white liberal guilt of otherwise progressive voters who may not be well informed about Theresa Hooks’s unfortunate record of bigotry and homophobia.
Indeed, Ms. Hooks’s position with respect to Cathedral City’s substantial queer community is rather clear. She does not much care for us, and would doubtless prefer to see us vanish. Indeed, in a breathless letter to the editor of the Desert Sun dated September 23, 2006, Hooks came eagerly to the defense of Focus on the Family, an anti-gay hate group, quoting the Genesis “male and female” creation narrative to justify discrimination against LGBT people.
Someone who is willing to be guided by Kathleen DeRosa’s political playbook to the extent of being willing to use financial information to harm her political rivals, and who is as obviously unfriendly to queerfolk as Theresa Hooks, is simply not the right choice for our city Council.
But if Theresa Hooks is the wrong choice for our Council and showed it last night, we may also fault the moderator and media panel at last night’s debate for creating a serious and obvious Brown Act violation.
California’s open meeting law, the Ralph M. Brown Act of 1949, forbids members of an elected body from reaching prior or advance consensus as to action outside of the context of duly noticed public meetings. A quorum or majority of a council or of a governing board may not get together, either directly, through intermediaries, or through communications such as telephone calls or emails, to arrive at what amounts to a pre-consensus before a formal public meeting is held and a decision is taken in the open where the public can see it and hold its representatives accountable. The Brown Act also applies to candidates. Liability under the Act attaches to both declared and qualified candidates.
Thus, last night, when one of the panel asked the candidates how each candidate intended to proceed when filling the Council seat Stan Henry will vacate when he becomes mayor, and each candidate expressed his or her intention, a potential quorum of the new council effectively had a meeting to decide a course of action well outside of what the Brown Act defines as permissible. Each candidate, by participating, violated the Act, and the media panelists and moderator Brooke Beare (from the local CBS affiliate,) made themselves accessories the violation. Now, it may be the candidates were legitimately unaware of the provisions of the Act, not having been educated as to its provisions and requirements.
I do not know whether, on the unbelievably lackluster watch of the current mayor, Cathedral City has abandoned its former practice of providing some basic orientation to Council candidates about the responsibilities under California’s political ethics laws, but I do remember that during my own victorious council campaign in 2002, I received just such an orientation. Had I been a candidate at a forum at which such a question was asked, I would have respectfully declined to answer on the grounds that the Brown Act was being violated.
Of course, when I brought the issue up to the panelists and the moderator after the forum, I was pooh-poohed. Nobody likes to have their egregious errors pointed out to them, even by somebody who does so politely. Perhaps my next step may well be to bring this matter to the attention of the District Attorney. After all, the Brown Act has been with us since 1949, and after 65 years, there is simply no good reason why debate moderators or panelists should not be aware of the rather stringent requirements of the Act and conform their conduct to it.
The rule of law suffers when it is ignored, as it has been too often in Cathedral City of late. I don’t think Theresa Hooks has the first idea of what the rule of law is, or she would not be so eager to go digging into the private lives of her political rivals, trying to find the same kind of dirt on them that her political mentor, Kathleen Joan DeRosa, has been trying to find on the numerous people in Cathedral City she considers enemies.
I know whom I will support in this election, I also know whom I will not, and Theresa Hooks is at the top of my “do not support” list.
Friday, September 26, 2014
AN OPEN LETTER TO DESERT SUN PUBLISHER MARK WINKLER AFTER BEING BLACKLISTED
SUMMARY: what follows is the text of an open letter from me to Mark Winkler, publisher of the Desert Sun. In it, I address the unwillingness or inability of his newspaper to bear the slightest accent of criticism or reproof. I also address the extent to which the corporate culture of the desert sun appears to be driven by personal antipathies. Moreover, at a time when the mainstream media are embracing an ethic of transparency and responsiveness to differences of opinion, the desert sun has been marching steadfastly in the opposite direction, embracing a Fox News ethic of “cutting off the microphone,” so to speak of any critic or dissenter. When I had the effrontery to express views differing from those of the Desert Sun’s staff, I was blacklisted from either commenting on articles the Desert Sun or participating in the Desert Sun’s “You’ve Got Issues” Facebook group. I’ve written to the publisher of the Desert Sun because the buck has to stop somewhere; I’ll post in this blog any response I might actually get from a newspaper that has never felt the need for either an ombudsman or a public editor.
Mark Winkler
THE Desert Sun
750 North Gene Autry Trail
Palm Springs, CA 92262
RE: AN OPEN LETTER CONCERNING THE DESERT SUN’S UNWILLINGNESS TO TOLERATE DIFFERING VIEWS AND OPINIONS; BLACKLISTING OF DISSENTERS
Daar Mr. Winkler:
At a time when increasing numbers of mainstream media outlets are adopting a culture of responsive transparency to reader concerns and expressions of differing views and opinions, The Desert Sun appears to be marching steadfastly in the opposite direction. Apparently, your so-called community conversations staff have preferred to take instruction from Fox News, and to suppress expressions of opinion, particularly from the undersigned, that they appear to find uncongenial.
More disturbing even than The Desert Sun’s apparent inability to bear the slightest accent of disagreement or reproof is the almost aggressively defensive posture of the newspaper when it is caught out in grave and serious error.
Your newspaper’s inability to bear the accent of criticism or reproof has been expressed in an apparent decision from one or more members of your staff to disable the undersigned’s ability to comment on any of your articles, and in the undersigned’s exclusion and blocking from the so-called “You’ve Got Issues” Facebook group which The Desert Sun apparently regards as being an adequate substitute for having either an ombudsman or a public editor. In short, the undersigned has been effectively blacklisted. Because your newspaper has neither a public editor nor an ombudsman, the undersigned addresses his correspondence directly to you, the accountable manager with whom the buck must stop.
A couple of examples of The Desert Sun’s unwillingness to tolerate the expression of differing or alternative views will suffice.
THE UNDERSIGNED’S EXPRESSION OF CONCERN RESPECTING HIGH SCHOOL FOORBALL COVERAGE
Recently, the undersigned, commenting in The Desert Sun’s much vaunted “You’ve Got Issues” Facebook group, expressed concerns about the tone and amount of Desert Sun coverage of local high school football. Given the tone and tenor of the national conversation about high school football and the social paradigms it enables, to say nothing of the serious medical consequences it can, and frequently does, and gender, my expression of concern was well within the national mainstream of discussion.
But James Folmer, your “Community Conversations Editor,” was having none of it. With all of the zealous vigor of orthodoxy stamping out heresy, Mr. Folmer responded to the undersigned that high school football was a “big deal” in the Coachella Valley, and that notwithstanding any expressions of concern from the undersigned or others, The Desert Sun would continue to treat high school football as a “big deal.”
The tone of Mr. Folmer’s comments was such as to indicate to the undersigned that he was absolutely unwilling and unprepared to acknowledge even the slightest degree of merit to the undersigned’s concerns. (Though Mr. Folmer appears not merely indifferent, but hostile, to the undersigned’s concerns, it is worth noting that the cover story of the September 29, 2014 number of Time magazine deals with the football-related death of 16-year-old Chad Stover, of Tipton, Missouri, and showcased the very real and rising concern among parents, physicians, and political leaders about the medical risks associated with the “big deal” that The Desert Sun apparently considers high school football to be.)
The undersigned also expressed concern that The Desert Sun’s apparently uncritical and even breathless coverage of high school football tended to shortchange the achievements of high school students whose talents are not expressed on the gridiron, and that such coverage also tends to reinforce often dysfunctional social paradigms in our secondary education system. The undersigned also noted that in secondary school social paradigms such as those Mr. Folmer apparently considers normative and optimal, varsity football players and cheerleaders often enjoy a kind of tacit permission to engage in transgressive behaviors which would call down a world of hurt and punishment on students outside the relatively small, select circle of the varsity football program. Again, Mr. Folmer was having none of it.
THE “GENERAL ASSEMBLY” MISNOMERS
The other major issue with respect to which your staff and of the undersigned have found themselves in disagreement is the fairly serious blunder The Desert Sun made recently when your interactive media staffer, Rob Hopwood, constructed an interactive feature designed to show which candidates were seeking office in any given election. Mr. Hopwood, who had worked for Gannett in North Carolina before relocating to California six years ago, referred to our California Legislature as the General Assembly (as it is in North Carolina). The undersigned called Hopwood’s attention to the error. When Hopwood acknowledged that he had been resident in California for six years prior to constructing the interactive display, the undersigned expressed some degree of surprise that so much time would pass without Hopwood acquainting himself with California’s public institutions of self-government. Though Hopwood corrected the error, he felt it necessary to cast himself as some kind of victim, and quickly personalized the issue.
This is not the first time that The Desert Sun has erroneously referred to our state Legislature as the General Assembly. Shortly after coming to The Desert Sun, James Folmer made the same error in his self introduction column, asking “how did the General Assembly do?” Though the error is plain for all to see in the cloud and in print in back numbers of The Desert Sun, Mr. Folmer indignantly denied to the undersigned that he had ever done such a thing.
When the undersigned suggested that referring to California’s Legislature by the name of a foreign jurisdiction’s parliamentary body sent a non-recommending message about the extent to which this newspaper and its staff are engaged with and invested in this community, that was apparently the last straw. It now appears of the undersigned that a decision appears to been taken, perhaps in consultation with a number of Desert Sun staffers, to blacklist the undersigned and to exclude any of the undersigned’s expressions of opinion from any so-called community conversation of which The Desert Sun is a part
To the extent of The Desert Sun wishes to treat the undersigned is a nonperson, it is free, like Fox News or Pravda, to do so. However, the undersigned will continue to offer alternative points of view through the vehicle of the undersigned’s independent blog. Among those alternative points of view, the undersigned will not be at all hesitant to raise the issue of the extent to which The Desert Sun seems to be abandoning an emerging journalistic ethic of inclusive, responsive, responsible transparency.
If, as the undersigned sadly suspects to be the case, decision-making at The Desert Sun is being driven by personal antipathies and an unwillingness to entertain viewpoints that differ from your own, then you will have only ourselves to blame when others in the community begin to call you out for the one-sided perspective that inevitably attaches itself to a newspaper that believes itself to be the only game in town.
The undersigned trusts you will have the courtesy to look into the matters the undersigned has raised, and to tender to the undersigned a thoughtful, non-dismissive, merits-based response, addressing the issue of whether blackisting differing opinions comports with basic canons of journalistic ethics. The undersigned does not seek a personal confrontation with you; however, as the undersigned has observed hereinabove, you are the publisher, the head shot-caller; the buck does stop with you, and you, as publisher, are ultimately responsible and accountable for the corporate culture of your newspaper.
LAW OFFICES OF PAUL S. MARCHAND
/s/
By: Paul S. Marchand
PSM:
Mark Winkler
THE Desert Sun
750 North Gene Autry Trail
Palm Springs, CA 92262
RE: AN OPEN LETTER CONCERNING THE DESERT SUN’S UNWILLINGNESS TO TOLERATE DIFFERING VIEWS AND OPINIONS; BLACKLISTING OF DISSENTERS
Daar Mr. Winkler:
At a time when increasing numbers of mainstream media outlets are adopting a culture of responsive transparency to reader concerns and expressions of differing views and opinions, The Desert Sun appears to be marching steadfastly in the opposite direction. Apparently, your so-called community conversations staff have preferred to take instruction from Fox News, and to suppress expressions of opinion, particularly from the undersigned, that they appear to find uncongenial.
More disturbing even than The Desert Sun’s apparent inability to bear the slightest accent of disagreement or reproof is the almost aggressively defensive posture of the newspaper when it is caught out in grave and serious error.
Your newspaper’s inability to bear the accent of criticism or reproof has been expressed in an apparent decision from one or more members of your staff to disable the undersigned’s ability to comment on any of your articles, and in the undersigned’s exclusion and blocking from the so-called “You’ve Got Issues” Facebook group which The Desert Sun apparently regards as being an adequate substitute for having either an ombudsman or a public editor. In short, the undersigned has been effectively blacklisted. Because your newspaper has neither a public editor nor an ombudsman, the undersigned addresses his correspondence directly to you, the accountable manager with whom the buck must stop.
A couple of examples of The Desert Sun’s unwillingness to tolerate the expression of differing or alternative views will suffice.
THE UNDERSIGNED’S EXPRESSION OF CONCERN RESPECTING HIGH SCHOOL FOORBALL COVERAGE
Recently, the undersigned, commenting in The Desert Sun’s much vaunted “You’ve Got Issues” Facebook group, expressed concerns about the tone and amount of Desert Sun coverage of local high school football. Given the tone and tenor of the national conversation about high school football and the social paradigms it enables, to say nothing of the serious medical consequences it can, and frequently does, and gender, my expression of concern was well within the national mainstream of discussion.
But James Folmer, your “Community Conversations Editor,” was having none of it. With all of the zealous vigor of orthodoxy stamping out heresy, Mr. Folmer responded to the undersigned that high school football was a “big deal” in the Coachella Valley, and that notwithstanding any expressions of concern from the undersigned or others, The Desert Sun would continue to treat high school football as a “big deal.”
The tone of Mr. Folmer’s comments was such as to indicate to the undersigned that he was absolutely unwilling and unprepared to acknowledge even the slightest degree of merit to the undersigned’s concerns. (Though Mr. Folmer appears not merely indifferent, but hostile, to the undersigned’s concerns, it is worth noting that the cover story of the September 29, 2014 number of Time magazine deals with the football-related death of 16-year-old Chad Stover, of Tipton, Missouri, and showcased the very real and rising concern among parents, physicians, and political leaders about the medical risks associated with the “big deal” that The Desert Sun apparently considers high school football to be.)
The undersigned also expressed concern that The Desert Sun’s apparently uncritical and even breathless coverage of high school football tended to shortchange the achievements of high school students whose talents are not expressed on the gridiron, and that such coverage also tends to reinforce often dysfunctional social paradigms in our secondary education system. The undersigned also noted that in secondary school social paradigms such as those Mr. Folmer apparently considers normative and optimal, varsity football players and cheerleaders often enjoy a kind of tacit permission to engage in transgressive behaviors which would call down a world of hurt and punishment on students outside the relatively small, select circle of the varsity football program. Again, Mr. Folmer was having none of it.
THE “GENERAL ASSEMBLY” MISNOMERS
The other major issue with respect to which your staff and of the undersigned have found themselves in disagreement is the fairly serious blunder The Desert Sun made recently when your interactive media staffer, Rob Hopwood, constructed an interactive feature designed to show which candidates were seeking office in any given election. Mr. Hopwood, who had worked for Gannett in North Carolina before relocating to California six years ago, referred to our California Legislature as the General Assembly (as it is in North Carolina). The undersigned called Hopwood’s attention to the error. When Hopwood acknowledged that he had been resident in California for six years prior to constructing the interactive display, the undersigned expressed some degree of surprise that so much time would pass without Hopwood acquainting himself with California’s public institutions of self-government. Though Hopwood corrected the error, he felt it necessary to cast himself as some kind of victim, and quickly personalized the issue.
This is not the first time that The Desert Sun has erroneously referred to our state Legislature as the General Assembly. Shortly after coming to The Desert Sun, James Folmer made the same error in his self introduction column, asking “how did the General Assembly do?” Though the error is plain for all to see in the cloud and in print in back numbers of The Desert Sun, Mr. Folmer indignantly denied to the undersigned that he had ever done such a thing.
When the undersigned suggested that referring to California’s Legislature by the name of a foreign jurisdiction’s parliamentary body sent a non-recommending message about the extent to which this newspaper and its staff are engaged with and invested in this community, that was apparently the last straw. It now appears of the undersigned that a decision appears to been taken, perhaps in consultation with a number of Desert Sun staffers, to blacklist the undersigned and to exclude any of the undersigned’s expressions of opinion from any so-called community conversation of which The Desert Sun is a part
To the extent of The Desert Sun wishes to treat the undersigned is a nonperson, it is free, like Fox News or Pravda, to do so. However, the undersigned will continue to offer alternative points of view through the vehicle of the undersigned’s independent blog. Among those alternative points of view, the undersigned will not be at all hesitant to raise the issue of the extent to which The Desert Sun seems to be abandoning an emerging journalistic ethic of inclusive, responsive, responsible transparency.
If, as the undersigned sadly suspects to be the case, decision-making at The Desert Sun is being driven by personal antipathies and an unwillingness to entertain viewpoints that differ from your own, then you will have only ourselves to blame when others in the community begin to call you out for the one-sided perspective that inevitably attaches itself to a newspaper that believes itself to be the only game in town.
The undersigned trusts you will have the courtesy to look into the matters the undersigned has raised, and to tender to the undersigned a thoughtful, non-dismissive, merits-based response, addressing the issue of whether blackisting differing opinions comports with basic canons of journalistic ethics. The undersigned does not seek a personal confrontation with you; however, as the undersigned has observed hereinabove, you are the publisher, the head shot-caller; the buck does stop with you, and you, as publisher, are ultimately responsible and accountable for the corporate culture of your newspaper.
LAW OFFICES OF PAUL S. MARCHAND
/s/
By: Paul S. Marchand
PSM:
Sunday, September 21, 2014
A WIN FOR EDMUND BURKE: THOUGHTS ON THE FAILURE OF SIX CALIFORNIAS AND THE SCOTLAND SECESSION REFERENDUM
Summary: the failure of the Scots secession referendum and of Tim Draper’s so-called Six Californias initiative should not surprise us. What should disturb us is the extent to which California Democrats simultaneously opposed “Six Californias” but cheerled for Scots secession, often for intellectually shoddy reasons. Instead of pouring scorn on the Unionist majority in Scotland’s secession referendum, California Democrats should thoughtfully knowledge that both Unionist voters in Scotland and California Democrats who rejected Six Californias were drawing from a common wellspring of the principled conservatism first articulated by the great Irish statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke, who postulated that institutions which are working well should not be lightly or frivolously abolished or materially altered. While SNP leader Alex Salmond and bloviating billionaire Tim Draper may be the big losers, Edmund Burke seems to have been the real winner.
In the last several days, two efforts to break up long-established, substantial bodies politic have been tried and found wanting. In California, Tim Draper’s Six Californias initiative failed to qualify for the November, 2016 ballot. It looks as if the conservative Silicon Valley billionaire’s effort to blow up the state of California and replace it with six smaller, squabbling jurisdictions has failed for the foreseeable future. In Scotland, in a referendum that commanded a larger voter turnout than any in Scottish history, 55 percent of the Scots electorate rejected the Scottish National Party’s bid to have Scotland secede from the United Kingdom.
Here in California, opposition to “Six Californias” was almost a litmus test issue among California Democrats. We correctly saw the effort as being largely Tim Draper’s ego trip, and we set our collective faces against what Draper had tried to market as a “reboot” of California.
But as much as California Democrats rejected partition for themselves, many were prepared to eagerly embrace the sundering of a British Union that had functioned more or less successfully since 1707. Some California Democrats offered thoughtful, principled arguments for Scots secession. Others poured forth word salads that leaned heavily on such undefinable left-wing jargon as “neoliberal neocolonialism” or its apparent fellow traveler “neoliberal neoimperialism,” couching their arguments in nothing more than some kind of reflexive, ostensibly progressive desire to pound a stake into the last home island remnant of the once vast British Empire. Finally, a disturbing number, perhaps even a plurality, of California Democrats couldn’t resist the temptation to see Scots secession as an ethnic revolt -a national liberation struggle, even- against the Sassenach English, as some kind of real life, 21st-century remake of Braveheart, with that sedevacantist idiot Mel Gibson daubing his face with woad and bellowing “they’ll never take our freedom!”
The disappointed reaction of Scots secession-supporting California Democrats has been predictable. The usual expressions of disappointment have traveled hand-in-hand with the almost standard “stupid voters” reaction so often felt by those on the losing side of a hard-fought election. Indeed, some California Democrats even found themselves Moscow’s fellow travelers, uttering rather Republican-sounding, conspiracist claims that the election had been tainted by voter fraud. Only one foreign government, that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, has made such a claim, presumably to delegitimize the Scots secession referendum result in the service of Moscow’s evident desire to poke a huge hole in the northern flank of NATO.
Yet, in the end, Moscow’s claims of Scots voter fraud are risible. Britain has a long and honorable history of conducting squeaky clean, aboveboard elections at every level, while Russia has a long and dishonorable history of conducting elections so obviously marred by fraud and vote rigging, and so obviously fraudulent on their face, as to be unworthy of the slightest credence.
Pot, meet kettle.
California Democrats should run, not walk, away from any bullshit Muscovite claim that the Scots secession referendum was vote-rigged, presumably by the Sassenach English.
Yet, as long as disappointed California Democrats have seen fit to open up vials of wrath on the Scottish electorate because Scotland didn’t vote the way certain ostensible progressives in California would have had them vote, California Democrats fail to recognize a reality that links them far more powerfully to Scotland’s “No” voters than many California Democrats might feel comfortable with. For, when all the sound and the fury are over, both the California and Scottish electorates have behaved in remarkably similar ways.
In most Anglo-American bodies politic, influenced in many ways by the thinking of the great Irish statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke, there is a strong streak of what can best be described as Burkean conservatism. Even those of us who identify as progressive often find ourselves confronting an existential Burkean paradox. We embrace progress, but not ungoverned, undisciplined, unthoughtful progress. We tend to look at existing institutions and prefer to conserve them as long as they are functioning reasonably effectively. While we stand for change, we tend to be skeptical of headlong alterations of tried and tested civic institutions. Maintaining a workable civil society is as important to progressives as it is to those who call themselves conservative, if not more so. Just saying “no” to all change has never been a workable option for progressives.
And this has been what distinguishes Anglo-American progressivism from typical American conservatism. Though Edmund Burke himself acknowledged the ineluctably and importance of change, an awful lot of American conservatives find themselves embracing the Falangist conservatism of men like the late William F. Buckley, Jr., who once famously declared that "a conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'".
It might be easy for certain California Democrats to belabor the Scots electorate with being reactionary, stick in the mud Buckleyan conservatives. Yet as tempting as such a characterization might be, it only serves to demonstrate a kind of willful myopia about the profoundly Burkean reality of the process by which 55 percent the Scots electorate reached its decision to remain within the United Kingdom.
There has been substantial coverage in British and international media and in the Scots and non-Scots blogosphere about the careful, thoughtful nature of the secession debate within the northern kindgom on both sides of the issue. Now the Scots have a reputation for being thoughtful, canny people, and for being heirs of world-famous Scottish Enlightenment, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the run-up to the referendum should have provided Scotland with an opportunity to think things out, and discuss the question of the utility of the Union in a considerate way we Americans can only envy. While the referendum was certainly accompanied by soundbites, snappishness, and all the angst and agita that accompany a hugely consequential election, it does seem to have been accompanied by a thoroughly civilized, thoroughly adult, very Scottish thought process.
Indeed, the Scots' discussion of the Scots secession referendum would have done Edmund Burke himself proud. Burke had an abiding faith in the power of rational debate to form sensible and cogent policy. At the same time, Burke also reprehended the kind of undisciplined, revolutionary enthusiasms he saw taking place in France. Burke may well have been right on that score; the history of France and her five Republics has been a history of an ongoing effort by the French people to develop and perfect strong, rational institutions for civil society. Yet, in more Burkean conservative societies in the Anglo-American world, we have been largely free of the hiccups and convulsions that have so marked the history of France since 1789.
The voters of Scotland were not looking to repeat 1789 in the streets and squares of Edinburgh, along the Royal Mile or in Holyroodhouse. What is relatively safe to infer is that Scots voters, whether supporters or opponents of secession, wanted to send a very clear message to Westminster that, whether in or out of Union, Scotland was no longer prepared to tolerate being treated as the negligible quantity Margaret Thatcher and the Tories had so long regarded Scotland and northern England as being.
To the extent that California Democrats rejected Six Californias and the Scots electorate rejected secession, both tapped deep into the ineffably Burkean wellsprings of much of our own political thinking. Much of Burke’s philosophy can indeed be summed up in the homely aphorism “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and in Bill Clinton’s equally homely aphorism “mend it, don’t end it.” For progressives, the real fight has often been defining how dysfunctional an institution must be before it can be considered broken.
Our fight has also been determine the degree to which we can mend before we must end. In both California and Scotland, both of which tend to break progressive in their political thinking, voters made a thoughtful determination that neither California nor the United Kingdom were so broken as to need radical alteration. Both bodies politic were felt to need nothing more than some routine mending to keep them functional well into the foreseeable future.
Advocates of radical change should consider carefully the extent to which Burkean thought is in many ways the default setting for an awful lot of political thinking worldwide. Instead of seeking to blow everything up, our natural tendency is to embrace the philosophy enunciated by the late Adm. of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov, who used to express his disdain for overengineered weapons systems by declaring “good enough is best.” For all of our dysfunctions and complaints, we and the Scots seem to have accepted Adm. Gorshkov’s pragmatic view that “good enough [really] is best.”
Moreover, in taking a “good enough is best” view, the canny Scots have arguably performed a uniquely clever bit of political jujitsu on the posh toffs down in the sweltering, Sassenach subtropics of London. Given that David Cameron’s Tory Government has apparently been frightened into promising to devolve even more extensive powers to the Scots Government at Holyroodhouse, Scotland now enjoys a unique faculty of taking credit for that which goes well in the northern kingdom, while shunting all blame for that which does not work well onto the sleazy, Sassenach politicians at Westminster.
At all events, the failure of Scots secession and Six Californias may yet have the prophylactic effect of forcing many of us who identify as progressives to confront our own internalized Burkean conservatism. For, when the sound and the fury are over, we can safely say that Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond and bloviating billionaire Tim Draper were the losers, but that Edmund Burke was very much the winner.
In the last several days, two efforts to break up long-established, substantial bodies politic have been tried and found wanting. In California, Tim Draper’s Six Californias initiative failed to qualify for the November, 2016 ballot. It looks as if the conservative Silicon Valley billionaire’s effort to blow up the state of California and replace it with six smaller, squabbling jurisdictions has failed for the foreseeable future. In Scotland, in a referendum that commanded a larger voter turnout than any in Scottish history, 55 percent of the Scots electorate rejected the Scottish National Party’s bid to have Scotland secede from the United Kingdom.
Here in California, opposition to “Six Californias” was almost a litmus test issue among California Democrats. We correctly saw the effort as being largely Tim Draper’s ego trip, and we set our collective faces against what Draper had tried to market as a “reboot” of California.
But as much as California Democrats rejected partition for themselves, many were prepared to eagerly embrace the sundering of a British Union that had functioned more or less successfully since 1707. Some California Democrats offered thoughtful, principled arguments for Scots secession. Others poured forth word salads that leaned heavily on such undefinable left-wing jargon as “neoliberal neocolonialism” or its apparent fellow traveler “neoliberal neoimperialism,” couching their arguments in nothing more than some kind of reflexive, ostensibly progressive desire to pound a stake into the last home island remnant of the once vast British Empire. Finally, a disturbing number, perhaps even a plurality, of California Democrats couldn’t resist the temptation to see Scots secession as an ethnic revolt -a national liberation struggle, even- against the Sassenach English, as some kind of real life, 21st-century remake of Braveheart, with that sedevacantist idiot Mel Gibson daubing his face with woad and bellowing “they’ll never take our freedom!”
The disappointed reaction of Scots secession-supporting California Democrats has been predictable. The usual expressions of disappointment have traveled hand-in-hand with the almost standard “stupid voters” reaction so often felt by those on the losing side of a hard-fought election. Indeed, some California Democrats even found themselves Moscow’s fellow travelers, uttering rather Republican-sounding, conspiracist claims that the election had been tainted by voter fraud. Only one foreign government, that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, has made such a claim, presumably to delegitimize the Scots secession referendum result in the service of Moscow’s evident desire to poke a huge hole in the northern flank of NATO.
Yet, in the end, Moscow’s claims of Scots voter fraud are risible. Britain has a long and honorable history of conducting squeaky clean, aboveboard elections at every level, while Russia has a long and dishonorable history of conducting elections so obviously marred by fraud and vote rigging, and so obviously fraudulent on their face, as to be unworthy of the slightest credence.
Pot, meet kettle.
California Democrats should run, not walk, away from any bullshit Muscovite claim that the Scots secession referendum was vote-rigged, presumably by the Sassenach English.
Yet, as long as disappointed California Democrats have seen fit to open up vials of wrath on the Scottish electorate because Scotland didn’t vote the way certain ostensible progressives in California would have had them vote, California Democrats fail to recognize a reality that links them far more powerfully to Scotland’s “No” voters than many California Democrats might feel comfortable with. For, when all the sound and the fury are over, both the California and Scottish electorates have behaved in remarkably similar ways.
In most Anglo-American bodies politic, influenced in many ways by the thinking of the great Irish statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke, there is a strong streak of what can best be described as Burkean conservatism. Even those of us who identify as progressive often find ourselves confronting an existential Burkean paradox. We embrace progress, but not ungoverned, undisciplined, unthoughtful progress. We tend to look at existing institutions and prefer to conserve them as long as they are functioning reasonably effectively. While we stand for change, we tend to be skeptical of headlong alterations of tried and tested civic institutions. Maintaining a workable civil society is as important to progressives as it is to those who call themselves conservative, if not more so. Just saying “no” to all change has never been a workable option for progressives.
And this has been what distinguishes Anglo-American progressivism from typical American conservatism. Though Edmund Burke himself acknowledged the ineluctably and importance of change, an awful lot of American conservatives find themselves embracing the Falangist conservatism of men like the late William F. Buckley, Jr., who once famously declared that "a conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'".
It might be easy for certain California Democrats to belabor the Scots electorate with being reactionary, stick in the mud Buckleyan conservatives. Yet as tempting as such a characterization might be, it only serves to demonstrate a kind of willful myopia about the profoundly Burkean reality of the process by which 55 percent the Scots electorate reached its decision to remain within the United Kingdom.
There has been substantial coverage in British and international media and in the Scots and non-Scots blogosphere about the careful, thoughtful nature of the secession debate within the northern kindgom on both sides of the issue. Now the Scots have a reputation for being thoughtful, canny people, and for being heirs of world-famous Scottish Enlightenment, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the run-up to the referendum should have provided Scotland with an opportunity to think things out, and discuss the question of the utility of the Union in a considerate way we Americans can only envy. While the referendum was certainly accompanied by soundbites, snappishness, and all the angst and agita that accompany a hugely consequential election, it does seem to have been accompanied by a thoroughly civilized, thoroughly adult, very Scottish thought process.
Indeed, the Scots' discussion of the Scots secession referendum would have done Edmund Burke himself proud. Burke had an abiding faith in the power of rational debate to form sensible and cogent policy. At the same time, Burke also reprehended the kind of undisciplined, revolutionary enthusiasms he saw taking place in France. Burke may well have been right on that score; the history of France and her five Republics has been a history of an ongoing effort by the French people to develop and perfect strong, rational institutions for civil society. Yet, in more Burkean conservative societies in the Anglo-American world, we have been largely free of the hiccups and convulsions that have so marked the history of France since 1789.
The voters of Scotland were not looking to repeat 1789 in the streets and squares of Edinburgh, along the Royal Mile or in Holyroodhouse. What is relatively safe to infer is that Scots voters, whether supporters or opponents of secession, wanted to send a very clear message to Westminster that, whether in or out of Union, Scotland was no longer prepared to tolerate being treated as the negligible quantity Margaret Thatcher and the Tories had so long regarded Scotland and northern England as being.
To the extent that California Democrats rejected Six Californias and the Scots electorate rejected secession, both tapped deep into the ineffably Burkean wellsprings of much of our own political thinking. Much of Burke’s philosophy can indeed be summed up in the homely aphorism “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and in Bill Clinton’s equally homely aphorism “mend it, don’t end it.” For progressives, the real fight has often been defining how dysfunctional an institution must be before it can be considered broken.
Our fight has also been determine the degree to which we can mend before we must end. In both California and Scotland, both of which tend to break progressive in their political thinking, voters made a thoughtful determination that neither California nor the United Kingdom were so broken as to need radical alteration. Both bodies politic were felt to need nothing more than some routine mending to keep them functional well into the foreseeable future.
Advocates of radical change should consider carefully the extent to which Burkean thought is in many ways the default setting for an awful lot of political thinking worldwide. Instead of seeking to blow everything up, our natural tendency is to embrace the philosophy enunciated by the late Adm. of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov, who used to express his disdain for overengineered weapons systems by declaring “good enough is best.” For all of our dysfunctions and complaints, we and the Scots seem to have accepted Adm. Gorshkov’s pragmatic view that “good enough [really] is best.”
Moreover, in taking a “good enough is best” view, the canny Scots have arguably performed a uniquely clever bit of political jujitsu on the posh toffs down in the sweltering, Sassenach subtropics of London. Given that David Cameron’s Tory Government has apparently been frightened into promising to devolve even more extensive powers to the Scots Government at Holyroodhouse, Scotland now enjoys a unique faculty of taking credit for that which goes well in the northern kingdom, while shunting all blame for that which does not work well onto the sleazy, Sassenach politicians at Westminster.
At all events, the failure of Scots secession and Six Californias may yet have the prophylactic effect of forcing many of us who identify as progressives to confront our own internalized Burkean conservatism. For, when the sound and the fury are over, we can safely say that Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond and bloviating billionaire Tim Draper were the losers, but that Edmund Burke was very much the winner.
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