QUEER, BUT ASSIMILATED

Summary: For gay men of a “certain age,” coming out used to involve a great deal of introspection and a certain amount of, wait for it, drama. Many of us of that certain age remember when being queer carried with it a taint of implicit criminality, of the “abominable and detestable crime against nature.” Now, a taint is simply a slang term for the perineum; yet, despite that implicit taint of criminality with which we were tarred, queer-folk managed to pull off a kind of fierce, fabulous exoticism that saw us through the AIDS crisis in the battle for marriage. Now, however, we are becoming more assimilated and more integrated, less exotic than endotic. Coming out, once a kind of personal Declaration of Independence, has become more of a high school rite of passage akin to getting one’s first drivers license. We are out now, but we have been assimilated, as if the Borg had paid us a visit.

Today is National Coming out Day. It’s an unofficial holiday for encouraging timorous queerfolk cowering in the Narnia at the back of their closets to do more than take a tentative peek out of the closet door. NCOD is supposed to engender busting down the closet door, ripping it off its hinges, and emerging like a butterfly from its chrysalis singing “I am what I am.”

It’s also, perhaps, a time for those of us who are out, who are fully fledged queerfolk, to do a little retrospection about the process by which we emerged from our own individual closets. To take a look at the steps, often incremental and punctuated with false starts, by which we came to own our queer identities.

For example, I can remember the first time I kissed another boy and liked it — a lot — more than 4 decades ago, when I was a mere stripling of fifteen. I remember my first encounter with another man, receiving a hurried blow job in the side yard of a house in Pacific Palisades during a party. Similarly, I can remember what it was like to “go all the way” with another guy, in a bedroom in a fraternity house on the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville, shortly after turning eighteen. I can remember the masculine physicality, the pleasure of our mutual explorations, and how at a certain point we both attained climax and fell into each other’s arms in the blissful sleep that only men can enjoy after sex.

Yet those initial encounters, those early forays into same-sex intimacy were highly fraught. My first two underage encounters could, even in ostensibly liberal California, have called forth criminal prosecution and significant exposure. California remains a state where at least one senior deputy district attorney can proclaim that “the position of [her] office is that it is absolutely illegal in California for any person under the age of eighteen to be sexually intimate with any other person whomsoever, in any way, shape, or form.”

The situation in Tennessee was even worse. My frat house fling with that other man, even though we were both over eighteen, could have resulted in a felony prosecution against both of us for “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” defined under Tennessee’s then applicable law as a very serious felony calling for a sentence of up to 20 years in the state penitentiary.

Moreover, in addition to being tarred with the taint and stigma of criminality, any excursions in same-sex intimacy in the late 1970s and early 1980s also and necessarily took place against the backdrop of an impending or ongoing health crisis. Even today, I remember the AIDS crisis with a combination of apprehension and deep sadness. For in truth, I came of age — both legally and sexually — at one of the most devastating times in queer history.

For what middle-aged queer man, of that certain age, then living in either New York or Los Angeles does not remember the two companion articles that appeared concurrently in the July 3, 1981 additions of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, headlined “rare cancer found in 41 homosexuals.” Having experienced the welcome, if equivocal, pleasures of masculine intimacy, I was, at seventeen, paying fairly regular, if discreet, attention to news coverage of what was then known simply as “the gay community.”

Thus, I read the story in the Los Angeles Times with great care and mounting apprehension, feeling a kind of nameless, inchoate, dread, not unlike that which millions of Americans have felt since the coming of Donald Trump to the presidency on January 20, 2017. I sensed that something terrifying was unfolding, the metaphorical candy store in which so many queerfolk had romped so pleasurably, was closing. The years of sexual liberation, of sex without consequence, were coming to an end.

As indeed they were.

The history of the AIDS epidemic is far too well-known, among both queerfolk and among our straight neighbors to require recapitulation. As gay men became ill and began to die at a frightening rate of all kinds of frightening ailments, those of us who were beginning to contemplate coming out took counsel of ourselves and perhaps a few very close friends. We redecorated our closets and hunkered down what promised to be a very, very long siege, one which might make the 900 days of Leningrad seem tame. Indeed, some of us retreated so far into our closets that we practically emerged in Narnia.

The fears the AIDS crisis engendered were often over the top and mythic in their proportion. The implication of all the fear mongering and mythmaking was that sharing even the slightest degree of same-sex intimacy was tantamount to signing one’s own death warrant, condemning oneself to a slow and hideous demise.

Much of this fear mongering came, not surprisingly, from our straight neighbors. From those who objected to our presence in the body politic, the fear mongering was delivered with ill disguised or open Schadenfreude. But worse was the “concern trolling” from those who profess themselves to be allies, in the form of “friendly” admonition or commiseration that did little but reinforce the closetedness to which so many of us felt condemned.The responses of the straight community ineluctably took the form of law enforcement "solutions" and a kind of atavistic appeal to neo-Victorian prudery which is still with us in the form of the #metoo movement.

Like many queerfolk, I allowed my own coming out to be delayed by the health crisis. Throughout the 1980s, through nearly a decade of college and law school, I remained the soul of closeted discretion. My vision of the Narnia at the back of my own closet, the West Hollywood of my fantasies, was a mythical, paradisiacal place where the men were handsome, the sex was hot, the health crisis was far away, and where one need fear neither societal censure nor the prospect of a lingering, languishing death.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest paradox of the AIDS crisis was how it not only brought our existence and our plight to the attention of our straight neighbors, but how, in a way, it forced us to mature as a community. For in a sense, the crisis was our own London blitz, our own Stalingrad, our own Srebrenica, our own Golgotha.

Yet, like the fabulous Gloria Gaynor, we survived.  Like the Abbé Sieyès father of the French Revolution, the byword for us was “nous avons survecu:” we survived.

And not only did we survive, we thrived in adversity. We learned how to reach purposefully for the levers of political power. We learned again the lesson of Stonewall: asking nicely gets you nowhere. We learned how to appeal to the sympathy, compunction, and sense of decency of the majority of our straight neighbors. And we appealed most of all to queer “proximity empathy,” that empathic sense that arises in people who realize that a friend, a family member, a neighbor, or a coworker, in short, anyone to whom one may be emotionally connected, is queer.

And, surveying the ground, realizing that the time had probably come when I could no longer conceal this existential fact about myself, I finally came out. It was July, 1990, nine years after those fateful headlines, and two weeks after being admitted to the California Bar. I was 26 when I came out, and indeed, 26 was, at the time, the average age for coming out.

I knew what it had been like to live a life of at least ostensible straightness. Indeed, I was not inexperienced in opposite-sex sexual intimacy. I had managed, despite terrible, probably morally blameworthy, imposture on my part, to provide my opposite-sex partners with reasonably satisfactory sexual experiences. Fortunately, I congratulated myself, I had not got sucked in to an ongoing relationship with any of the women with whom I had gone through the forms of traditional heterosexual intimacy. 

Coming out, formally admitting to my family and to my friends, without any quibble, cavil, or demur, that I was in fact a queer boy, a pooftah, a homosexualist (pace, Gore Vidal), a man who had sex with other men, in short that I was as queer as pink ink and as gay as a goose, proved in the event to be every bit the liberating experience it has been described by so many queer writers as being.

Being out to the family meant freedom from the exquisite discretion that I had theretofore felt necessary. I no longer had to be so careful when I looked at the paper. I no longer had to engage in the invidious pronoun shift so well known to queerfolk. I could take the occasional gander at a cute guy, even if I happened to be in the company of relatives.

Being out, in short, meant that I could be candid about myself and the existential reality of what I was and am. Queer pundit Andrew Sullivan has observed that one of the critical marks of differencing the distinguishes gay men from our straight neighbors is our candor about matters sexual. That candor can be liberating, although I don’t know a single gay man who has not been occasionally admonished by even supportive family members that he is offering “TMI,” too much information.

Yet, at some point along one’s queer journey, the personal ineluctably becomes the political. And, perhaps ineluctably, I became involved in a series of queer causes. I did the AIDS walk. I marched in the pride parade, swinging a smoking thurible 2 miles down Santa Monica Blvd. at the head of the Episcopal Church contingent. I did pro bono work for AIDS patients, and in 1993, I was one of the first attorneys to challenge California’s ban on same-gender marriage, when I took on the case of two earnest young men who desired to be wed.

And it was then that I started to realize that the queer community, which had seemed to present such a united front to the straights was actually as divided and as full of bureaucrats, careerists, and apparatchiks as any straight community. I realized that there existed an unofficial, and extremely territorial, bureaucracy that had essentially taken possession of the queer community, and was very much determined to protect what it considered its territory against those whom they saw as interlopers. They saw themselves as very much the “Official Movement,” so to speak. They had made themselves very much the go-to people whenever the media, straight or queer, wanted commentary on any development affecting the queer nation.

Not surprisingly, this Official Movement considered itself very much in charge of setting the political agenda for queerfolk everywhere. Indeed, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with the Official Movement on whatever issue was considered important by that Official Movement was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time.

In 1993, the Official Movement, obsessed as it then was with the issue of queerfolk in the military, was not ready by any means to deal with marriage equality. Consequently, the Official Movement made it very clear to my marriage case clients and to me that we were “interlopers,” against whom they had set their face.

Indeed, instead of helping us, the Official Movement and its toadies in the queer media did their level best to hinder us, publicly chastising us and speaking of my clients and me that, had any straight person uttered them, would have been considered inappropriate; indeed, they were homophobic. Both my clients and I put up with many unjust slings and arrows from the Official Movement.

And that, to all intents and purposes, represented the end of my interaction with the Official Movement, and with the people who make up the Official Movement; the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender police, the social-justice-warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-late-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and - let us shame the devil and tell the truth - the star fuckers and the victory pimps, the people who will shove you aside to step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.

And, the “official movement” is still very much composed of such people today, operators, young-men-on-the-make, checkbook activists, gender warriors, PC enforcers, come late-to-the-party types, chow line crashers, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps. Most of us know who the victory pimps are; they’re the people who appear out of nowhere to participate in any victory the queer nation obtains. After all, as Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister) so famously put it, “victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.”

When Obergefell v. Hodges came down in 2015, guaranteeing marriage equality nationwide, the Official Movement, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps emerged from the woodwork and were falling all over each other to muscle their way to the head of the chow line to claim some share of the achievement. As I observed in my blog post of June 26 of that year,

"Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when an Official Movement muscles its way to the head of the chow line.  So, while I was happy for 15 minutes, it’s now back to normal, and I see nothing to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed and how it was won."

And indeed, a great many of the Doyens and Doyennes of the Official Movement really do have not the slightest clue about the manner in which our fight developed, or the manner in which was won. The coiffed, immaculately dressed, well-turned-out, passably cute twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who have become the face of the Official Movement have no idea what it was like during those days before the crisis, those liberated days of the late 1970s when anything seemed possible, even to a proto-homosexual still in his teen years.

Because, to a large extent, we have become domesticated. We are now just as much an integral Footnote Four minority in American society as the Irish, the Jews, the Buddhists, the Pagan/Wiccans and all the other communities that were once considered fashionably exotic. Like the Irish and the Jews, who also have been thoroughly integrated into American society, we’ve gone from being an exotic, quasi-criminal fringe with fabulous taste to being endotic, just like the Irish or the Jews, albeit still with fabulous taste.

And, being domesticated and endotic, should it surprise us that the average age for coming out has dropped from 26 into the early teens? Coming out is now less a process to be carried out with due introspection and complete honesty of self and purpose and more and adolescent rite of passage akin to getting one’s first drivers license. I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t lost something in the process. Like many older gay men, I wonder if we haven’t bereaved ourselves or been bereaved of some of what makes us unique -special, even- in society. In becoming a bourgeois, Footnote Four minority, enjoying significant protections in America’s most populous, bluest states, have we not lost touch with some of that subversive fabulousness which was so integral in making us us?

We queerfolk of a certain age have been tested as in a refiner’s fire. We had to learn the disciplines and protocols of exquisite discretion, of living well under both the disco ball and the sword of Damocles at the same time. Has our domestication, our transformation from exotic to endotic, deprived us of that faculty for living well in a time of crisis, for being fabulous, for seeing the irony in life and for holding up the shibboleths of society to relentless and critical examination? Have we lost our capacity for cultural dissidence? Or is it just that as we’ve get older it’s not so fabulous anymore?

About three years back, I looked in on a dear friend of mine, then still fabulous at 65— and still fabulous now at 68.  Being as he is thirteen years my senior, his memories - and those of his equally fabulous husband- of the late 1970s are sharper than mine; his experiences differ from mine, yet in many ways, they and I have more in common than either of us does with an out, loud, and proud high school senior taking his boyfriend to the prom, something we could never have done at that age. We were standing by the sliding glass doors in his dining room, looking out at the pool under a rainy sky.

It was a somber moment, and my friend turned to me and reminded me of an almost untranslatable haiku from Nagai Kafu, the great Japanese novelist of prewar Tokyo. Kafu’s haiku, in rough translation, is

Falling snow,
And Meiji is far away.

Turning to me as we watched the rain fall, making ripples on the water of the pool, he offered his riff on Kafu’s haiku:

Falling rain,
And Studio 54 is far away.

His haiku was, in its own way, an elegiac lament for a time we were old enough to remember, mature enough to know will never come again, and yet still special enough to us for us to regret its passing.

I’m glad I can be out. I didn’t expect things would turn out as they have. I can be who I authentically am, but I feel as if much of the collective Outness of our community is in danger of slipping away from us, as if we had been assimilated by the Borg, until we become nothing more than overly domesticated sexual minority kitsch, like mass-produced plastic souvenir coyotes howling at the pot lights in a tourist trap on a dark desert highway.

-xxx-

PAUL S. MARCHAND is a fiftysomething attorney who lives and in Cathedral City — where he served two terms on the city Council — and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage,. He is as queer as pink ink, and does not apologize for it. The views expressed herein are his own, and are certainly not those of the queer Official Movement. They are not intended as and are not to be construed as legal advice. This post is a revision and extension of a similar post from October, 2016.

OCTOBER 12: NEITHER COLUMBUS DAY NOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ DAY; WHY NOT CALL IT ENCOUNTER DAY?

Summary: Every year at Columbus Day, or perhaps, more accurately, Encounter 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/Encounter Day is, and will always remain, a paradox.  Perhaps we should call the commemoration by the more neutral, more fitting, title of Encounter Day

Cathedral City, October 11, 2016- Tomorrow is traditional Columbus Day. It is theoretically supposed to commemorate the achievement of Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator (and possible Sephardic Jew) who, by sailing across the Atlantic in the late summer and early fall all the Year of Grace 1492, proved what had long been believed and generally accepted in European thought: the sphericity of the earth. Italy and Spain both named warships for the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and there have been a raft of ocean liners named for him as well.

Commemoratively named warships and ocean liners notwithstanding, the view of many Americans of this day is colored, so to speak, by 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."

Yet, after 500 years, it is too late for the native people in the underbrush to review immigration policies. Now in the last generation, there is been a great deal of white liberal guilt, pearl clutching, handwringing, and revisionist history that has arisen around October 12, the Day of the Race, Columbus Day, or, as politically correct legislative bodies around the country now wish to call it, Indigenous People’s day. 

Permit me to suggest that if we must rename the commemoration of the arrival of Columbus’ Flota (or maybe with just three ships, it merits being described as a flotilla) at San Salvador in the Bahamas, we should perhaps try to commemorate the encounter itself, and refer to October 12 not by some Eurocentric, triumphalist description as Columbus Day, or by some politically correct moniker such as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but by the more neutral and more historically just appellation of “Encounter Day,” even as we remember the New Yorker cartoon with its Indians along the shoreline discussing the importance of reviewing their immigration policies.

The cartoon in question strikes us as funny because we know the history of the 500-plus years since Columbus' arrival in/encounter with 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.

For, in the last analysis, we all are descendants of immigrants from elsewhere, even the ethnic group Columbus first identified as “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 Inuit 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.  Of course, we should remember that the tenure of European occupation in the Western Hemisphere did not begin with the Colombian Encounter on October 12, 1492. In fact, we cannot know when the Europeans first encountered the Western Hemisphere. Some suggest that there may have been Egyptian, Carthaginian, or Roman expeditions to what is now the New World. Irish tradition has it that St. Brendan sailed to the New World with 15 monastic companions in an Irish curragh sometime in the early part of the sixth century.

More reliable, archaeologically-backed research indicates that the first European encounter with the Americas which we have a strong empirical basis to believe actually happened was that of Bjarni Herjólfsson in the year 986. Originally chronicled in the Norse Groenlandinga Saga, Herjólfsson’s voyage has been lent credence by the archaeological evidence of a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on the island of Newfoundland. Established around the year 1000, L’Anse aus Meadows, together with the Norse settlements in Greenland, establishes a European tenure of occupation in the Americas stretching back more than a thousand years.

No matter whose tradition one accepts, the history of the European-American encounter is more complex and more nuanced than our politically correct historical revisionists might like to believe.  The Americas were not -as generations of American 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 through complex state societies ranging from the mound-builder descendants of North America and the Méxica peoples, to the South American empire whose Inca inhabitants knew it as Tahuantinsuyu, the Four Quarters of the World.

Within two centuries of the Colombian Encounter, all of this had gone.  The westward migration, the völkerwanderung, 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: Norwegian scholar Helge Ingstad once declared that Columbus has succeeded largely because he and his fellows had firearms.), Superior agricultural and industrial technology, and the spread of European diseases -trivial childhood ailments to whites, fatal to unexposed Indians- together with firearms and edged weapons of Toledo steel, 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, or Encounter Day, 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."   

Despite the facile characterization of the pale people from Europe as eager perpetrators of “genocide,” we should be chary of attaching such a label to what transpired in the Western Hemisphere. Though the statistics of morbidity among indigenous peoples are certainly the statistics of apparent genocide, we need to be aware that genocide, in international law as defined by Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the concept of genocide, is itself a specific intent crime, i.e., the deliberate, non-negligent, non-accidental, extermination of a particular prople, in whole or in part.  Though we may be appalled at the morbidity statistics, the evidence suggests that the butcher’s bill was inflicted as the result of negligence, inattention, and a lack of knowledge rather than as the result of deliberate policy, and thus does not rise to the level of genocide as that term is understood in international law.

Thus, 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 Nãos, caravels and Mayflowers, their Susan Constants, their Godspeeds, and their Discoverys, or even aboard the White Star liner Oceanic, which brought my Limerick-born Irish grandmother across the Atlantic in 1913, and packed back whence they came; their bones and the bones of their children have, as much as the bones of the First Nations, also become part of this land.

Nor can we forget the other ramifications which have preceded from a biological phenomenon which has become known as the Columbian Exchange. Without the Columbian Exchange, the cuisines of Europe would be innocent of such now-integral foods and stimulants as the potato, the tomato, corn (a word which the British, who cannot seem to handle their own language, use to describe the grain properly known as “wheat.”) chocolate, vanilla, and tobacco. Similarly, without the Columbian Exchange, the tables of the New World would entirely lack such staples as citrus fruits, apples, bananas, mangoes, onions, wheat, rice, and that staple of insomniacs everywhere, coffee. Indeed, until the arrival of Hernán Cortés, the horse, which had originated in what is now North America but had become extinct there, had been unknown to the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

Moreover, while the pale invaders from across the water must take responsibility for such diseases as the measles, the emergence of syphilis, which for almost four centuries cut a horrifying swath across Europe, can be laid at the door of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. In short, the Columbian Exchange, like so many other phenomena throughout history, in the end must be accounted morally neutral. We should be foolish indeed to judge either Christopher Columbus or the Columbian Exchange by the purportedly modern standards of the 21st century. As Winston Churchill observed in 1938, in our own time, “we have seen archbishops pistolled in the nape of the neck in the warm, brilliantly lighted corridors of modern prison.” We have seen women and children machine gunned and hacked to death in their scores, hundreds, and thousands. We possess the capacity to extinguish all life on this planet. We thus have little claim to vaunt some kind of superior civilization to that in which Christopher Columbus, or his contemporaries the Méxica tlatoani Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, or the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac lived.

The invasion of the pale people from across the water 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, or Encounter 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 Burkean conservatives and Gladstonian liberals, and as Democrats, we must particularly be attuned on Columbus/Encounter 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/Encounter 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. . And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between....."  Whose day is Columbus Day?  Whose day is Indigenous Peoples' Day? Whose day is Encounter Day? It belongs to all of us, a day on which, perhaps more than on any other holiday or commemoration, 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 in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the City Council, And practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage.  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 in the year 2017.  Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.







                       

“THE ZHOU IS RESPLENDENT IN CULTURE, HAVING BEFORE THE EXAMPLES OF TWO PREVIOUS DYNASTIES. I AM FOR THE ZHOU:” THE CASE FOR TAIWAN ON DOUBLE TEN

Summary: Double Ten (October 10) is the national day of the Republic of China in Taiwan Province. It represents a commemoration of the Xinhai/Hsin-hai Revolution which overthrew the decadent and corrupt Qing/Ch’ing Dynasty during the winter of 1911/1912.

In the 108 years since the Xinhai/Hsin-hai revolution began, the history of East Asia has been, in many ways, a gory, clawing horror, full of just about every sin and wickedness of which human beings are capable. Yet, as we stumble our way into the third decade of the 21st century, we must acknowledge that, as between the two countries calling themselves China, there is more of a moral case to be made for the Republic of China in Taiwan Province then there is for the communist regime in Beijing. 2500 years ago, Confucius declared “the Zhou is resplendent in culture, having before the examples of two previous dynasties. I am for the Zhou.” Master Kong forthrightly proclaimed his preference. I do the same.

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Today, if you happen to be in the Western Pacific, and tomorrow, if you happen to be on our side of the International Date Line, is Double Ten, the 108th anniversary of the Wuchang Rising that sparked off the Xinhai/Hsin-hai Revolution that ultimately overthrew China’s decadent and corrupt Qing/Ch’ing Dynasty.

The Wuchang Uprising itself had a kind of Keystone Kops, slapstick aspect to it. During the evening of October 9, 1911, a Chinese revolutionary activist almost blew himself up by tinkering with a bomb he was trying to build. He was taken to hospital; the authorities got wind of what was going on; and to avoid a crackdown, the revolutionaries in Wuchang started an uprising against the local Ch’ing/Qing Huguang Viceroy. The Viceroy was overthrown, the three Wuhan cities of Hankou, Hanyang, and Wuchang were seized by revolutionary forces, and the Xinhai/Hsin-hai Revolution was well and truly underway. Within a matter of weeks, eighteen broad provinces of South China had thrown off the Qing/Ch’ing yoke. The Republic of China was proclaimed on January 1, 1912, and by February 12, 1912, the last Qing emperor had abdicated. 

Unfortunately, the overthrow of the Qing had left China without a stable central government whose writ could run everywhere within the national boundaries. Tibet and Outer Mongolia soon declared de facto independence. Mongolia remains independent to this day, while Tibet enjoyed her de facto independence from 1912 until 1951, when the People’s Liberation Army marched in and restored the traditional dependence of Lhasa upon Beijing. Moreover, East Turkestan, known to the Chinese as Xinjiang/Sinkiang, lost in central Asia between the Russian Empire and China proper, found itself in a kind of curious geopolitical limbo, somewhere between de facto independence and adherence to the Nationalist government in East China.

In fine, the period between 1912 and 1949 represented what the novelist Robert S. Elegant described in his novel Dynasty as a time of “gory, clawing horror.” The Republic, proclaimed on January 1, 1912 amid such extravagant hopes of a better future, soon found itself assailed and belabored on all sides: by the Japanese, by provincial warlords known as Dūjūn, by the Russians/Soviets in Xinjiang and in Manchuria, and above all, by the Chinese Communist Party under Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, and Mao Zedong. Under such conditions, the Republic, not surprisingly, soon gave itself over to Chiang Kai-shek, a military strongman who believed, rather like Donald Trump believes, that “only he could save China.” 

Now, in Chinese political philosophy and traditional Chinese thinking, the legitimacy of any government depends upon its possession of what is known as the “Mandate of Heaven,” a neat philosophical device by which the pragmatic sanction of events might be given a cloak of respectability. In the traditional calculus of Chinese political thinking, dynasties at their beginning were held to possess the Mandate of Heaven, but as they declined, the Mandate of Heaven was held to have slipped away from the Dynasty in question. And as dynasties entered their and stages, a godsend or a catastrophe could very well trigger the ultimate collapse.

For the Republic, hard-pressed at every turn, possession of the Mandate of Heaven could never be assumed. Tragically, the Republic of China resembled nothing so much as as an imperial Dynasty in its terminal stages, fighting for its life against enemies both foreign and domestic. Born in civil strife, the Republic never knew a moment’s peace. The Civil War the began with the overthrow of the Qing was the backdrop against which the life of the Republic played itself out on mainland China. By 1949, the Communists had been victorious; the Republic had fled to the island of Taiwan, anchored like a great, unsinkable ark, a hundred miles off the coast of Fujian province.

And there the Republic has remained safely ensconced to this very day. In pragmatic, historic terms, the Mandate of Heaven on the mainland has clearly passed to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). However, in a Confucian sense, and indeed, even in a Western moral sense, the case for the Republic of China, ensconced as it is in Taiwan province, remains strong, even unanswerable. 

Now we must acknowledge that the history of the Republic, both on the mainland and on Taiwan has not been without some significant blots upon its escutcheon. In particular, the treatment of local Taiwanese by agents of the ruling Kuomintang in the years following the Japanese retrocession of Taiwan (which had been under Japanese occupation since the Sino Japanese War of 1894-1895), and the authoritarian rule by the Kuomintang up until martial law was lifted in 1987, must stand as two of those significant blots on the escutcheon of both the Republic and the Kuomintang.

Nonetheless, the Republic has had significant success in democratization and political reform. Moreover, its record is largely innocent of the kinds of horrors of which the PRC has been guilty during the 70 years of its rule on the mainland. The CCP can justifiably be taxed with the extermination of much of China’s middle-class following 1949, with the horrors of the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, which led to the famine related deaths of millions of Chinese farmers, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and such lesser enormities as the harvesting of organs of convicted criminals. Finally, we knew, after the events of Tiananmen in June, 1989, that the PRC, by appealing to mere naked force, had abandoned any claim to legitimacy or benevolence. The People’s Liberation Army, which the government of the PRC had insisted existed to protect the “workers and peasants” of China had been revealed to be nothing more than a muscular instrument of state terror. 

And that’s only what happened within China Proper. In the “hinterlands,” in Xinjiang and Tibet in particular, the horrors have continued. In Tibet, particularly after the flight of the 14th Dalai Lama in 1959, the Beijing authorities essentially declared open season on the Tibetan people and upon their ancient, nonviolent, Buddhist culture. In Xinjiang, where the Uighur people of East Turkestan, who have lived there since the dawn of recorded history, have been persecuted for their Islamic faith, and herded into what can only be described as concentration camps, while Han Chinese apparatchiks occupy the cities and run the infrastructure. It is not unreasonable to believe, in fact, that something approaching a genocide of the Uighur people may be underway in East Turkestan.

Of course, the PRC, as an acknowledged great power, can get away with such gory, clawing horrors. It can also get away with such Orwellian institutions as “social credit” system of mass reputational surveillance of individuals. The Republic, on the other hand, has always been more transparent and more subject to worldwide scrutiny. And as such, the Republic has had to behave more responsibly, and more in line with what Confucius the great Sage, himself might have called Benevolence and Propriety.

More than 2500 years ago, Confucius said “the Zhou is resplendent in culture, having before at the examples of two previous dynasties. I am for the Zhou.” Confucius, Analects, 3:14. The Republic of China is resplendent in culture and superior in Benevolence and Propriety. I am for the Republic.

On this Double Ten, I take the liberty of extending my best wishes to the people of the Republic of China in Taiwan and Fujian provinces.

Chung Hua Wan Sui. 10,000 years the Republic of China.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand (whose Chinese business name is Ma Yuan) is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He has traveled in the People’s Republic of China. Whatever may have been the benefit of the doubt to which the PRC might have been entitled in the 1980s vanished with the massacre of Tiananmen Square. Thus, Mr. Marchand’s sympathies are entirely with the Republic of China in its fortress of propriety on the island of Taiwan.