A DAY OF INCONVENIENT TRUTHS

Summary: Memorial Day was once a time for harmless escapism.  No more.  A decade and a half of unending war half a world away forces us to face a number of inconvenient truths that are either politically, militarily, or socially discomforting.  Memorial Day emerged from a great struggle for social justice.  Endless war has stretched the army to the point where senior generals worry about breaking the Army.  Our maritime pivot to Asia is being starved of resources.  Our capacity for civil discourse is diminishing.  These are some things to contemplate on Memorial Day.  These are the challenges the day calls to address.

Time was that Memorial Day was a time for barbecues, a time for putting on white shoes, a time for scoping good-looking dudes at the beach or poolside, while ever and anon paying lip service to the memory of America’s fallen.

That was Memorial Day in peacetime, during those intermittent gaps between America’s normal state of being, military conflict.

But the United States has been at war for half a generation now. Kids are being blown up in Afghanistan who were toddlers on that thrice cursed day in September, 2001, when a bunch of Muslim terrorists drove airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

As we remember, therefore, those who have given their lives in at least the nominal defense of the United States, we should, perhaps, take time to recall what sometime Vice President Al Gore might have called “inconvenient truths.” 

Truth telling is an integral part of most military cultures. Indeed, in the Marine Corps, truth telling is held at an almost unbearably high premium, because when leaders lie, Marines die.

But it’s not just Marines who die when leaders lie. When leaders lie, American fighters from every branch of the armed services die. Too many leaders have lied and too many American soldiers have died for us ever to forget or forgive the systematic untruths by which we were buffaloed into a war in Iraq that should never have happened, but which George Dubya Bush and Dick Cheney manufactured and sold to a hoodwinked American public.

Let’s take a look at some inconvenient truths we need to confront today.

INCONVENIENT TRUTH, MEMORIAL DAY IS ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE: Our commemoration of America’s war dead emerged from perhaps the greatest struggle for social justice ever waged in this country. Now, a lot of American conservatives like to pooh-pooh the whole concept of social justice. Many of them turn a deaf ear on Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Potter’s immortal observation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” If getting rid of slavery was not a struggle for social justice, then I daresay most of us don’t know what is.

INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE DEAD WERE HARDLY MORE THAN BOYS: We should consider this Memorial Day, as we remember our war dead, how few has been the number of years when America could truly say that she was at peace at home and abroad. Yet, since 2001, unending war in distant places has become our new normal. It should be a little shocking to us that children too young to have even the fuzziest memories of 9/11 should be coming home in boxes from a battlefield on which American soldiers have been fighting for more than a decade. And as we watch the flag draped coffins come back to cities and towns and burying places all over America, we cannot help but remember the haunting words of Grantland Rice, “I’ve noticed that the dead were hardly more than boys.”

INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE WAR HAS REIGNITED DEBATE OVER CONSCRIPTION: If the dead have been hardly more than boys, the prosecution of our endless war in the sands and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan has raised disturbing questions about the utility of an all volunteer military. Some have suggested that we should revert to a draft, arguing that an updated version of conscription will ensure that the rich as well as the poor find themselves in harms way. Opponents of the draft argue that the willingness of young men and women to volunteer constitutes a useful barometer of public acceptance of America’s military conflicts. Between these two positions is an almost impassable gulf, one not made any easier by the fact that volunteering for armed service is often either a function of dire social necessity or a deeply Freudian decision by those not in economic straits to plumb the depths of their own warrior nature.

INCONVENIENT TRUTH, YES, IT IS POSSIBLE TO BREAK THE ARMY: Yet, as a number of senior military leaders have warned, mere warrior nature won’t avail against the serious structural problems confronting the American military in consequence of a decades long war prosecuted half a world away. As early as 2003, senior commanders were warning that multiple operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq had potential to “break the Army.” The Army remains largely unbroken, largely because it has treated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a laboratory for developing new war fighting methodologies. The experience of Afghanistan and Iraq has been a vade mecum for how boots on the ground can fight a new kind of war.

INCONVENIENT TRUTH, WE STILL NEED TO BE CONSCIOUS OF THE MARITIME THREAT: All the on ground experience in Afghanistan means little at sea elsewhere. Afghanistan and Iraq have not taught the Navy much about maritime conflict. Aside from raiding the Navy for ground pounders, and with the exception of Navy corpsmen attached Marine units, Iraq and Afghanistan have been largely irrelevant to the Navy’s larger mission within the defense context. The inconvenient truth we confront is that as America pivots more to the Far East, our increasingly contentious posture with respect to China will be largely driven by our ability to marshal naval assets to counter the increasing blue water power projection capabilities of the PLA Navy.

INCONVENIENT TRUTH, ENDLESS WAR IS BEREAVING US OF THE FACULTY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE AND DEBATE: Whether we speak of lessons learned by the Army and the Marines or unwonted burdens borne the Air Force, the Coast Guard, and that majority of the Navy which are not Marines, the fact remains that on this Memorial Day, the greatest of all the inconvenient truths from which we shy is that a decade and a half of war has helped coarsen our own national discourse. We Americans seem to be losing the capacity to agree disagreeably, to find common ground even in the presence of divergent views, to acknowledge that it is possible for one who sees the world differently to be just as patriotic as oneself.

And in such a polarized climate, though we may account ourselves fortunate that no single party or political ideology has successfully repeated the Nixon Administration's 1970s-vintage efforts to appropriate national symbols to the exclusive use and benefit of the Republican Party, we still need to make a greater effort to relearn our American faculty for honest, forthright debate over the issues of war and peace that transfix us as much today as when American fighters first went to wage war in an Islamic country more than two centuries ago, at the time Thomas Jefferson sent the Navy to chastise the Barbary Pirates. For if we are to be a country fit for heroes to live in, then “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, is necessary.

On this Memorial Day, as we find ourselves on the cusp between two wars, one in Afghanistan and a possible new one in the Middle East against the cartoonishly evil Islamist extremists of Daesh (the so-called Islamic State), we need to set ourselves to the accomplishment of that substantial additional work, so that we can say we have done right by the fallen and also preserved for our returning veterans a country in which a rich marketplace of ideas can still thrive, where “freedom” remains more than a buzzword, devoid of meaning in an increasingly polarized, militant “'Murica.”

A LIGHT AMONG THE NATIONS

Summary: Ireland’s two to one vote in favor of marriage equality has been somewhat astonishing. Given the historically conservative nature of the Irish electorate and the power of the Roman Catholic Church in the Irish body politic, the thumping great margin of victory should be a message not only to the Vatican, but also to American conservatives. Of course, American conservatives, contemptuous of “Old Europe,” will ramp up the outrage machine, but today Ireland resumes her ancient role as teacher, and as a light among the nations.

Something extraordinary has happened in Ireland. Conservative, Catholic, isolated, insular, inward-looking Ireland has just voted by a roughly two to one margin for marriage equality. Ireland has become the first nation in the world where marriage equality has become a reality by popular vote. This is not the first time Ireland has led the world.

A thousand and more years ago, the Irish rescued civilization, accumulating and passing on the knowledge of classical antiquity. If Western Christian civilization survived by clinging to pinnacles of rock like Skellig Michael, 18 miles off the Irish coast, it also survived because the Irish sent wave after wave of missionaries and teachers to bring Western, Christian European civilization back to the continent from which it had almost been extirpated.

Today the Irish are again our teachers. Today the Irish have upended entirely the conventional wisdom that civil rights for queerfolk can’t come through a democratic process, but only through judicial fiat. For a long time, it had simply been taken for granted that straight people would never vote to extend basic civil rights protections to queerfolk. Our equality before the law would have to be won in the courts, by appealing to norms enshrined in constitutions and other documents such as the United Nations Charter on Human Rights. The conventional wisdom was enshrined in such simple soundbites as “you don’t vote on human rights.” Apparently, Irish voters didn’t get that memo.

But the Irish, those special and dear people of God, those inhabitants of my ancestral Island, those amazingly steadfast people whose powers of endurance have manifested themselves from Clontarf in 1014, when they sent the Vikings packing, through seven centuries of English occupation, right down to the Easter Rising 99 years ago, have always possessed a capacity to confound the great, the powerful, and the mighty. Just when you think you’ve come to know the ways of Hibernia, something will say to you “stop, listen, and learn how little you really do know of Ireland and her ancient people.”

For given what we all thought we knew about conservative, Catholic, insular, inward-looking Ireland, who would have thought that marriage equality would become law in the 26 counties of the Republic? Moreover, who would have thought that marriage equality would become law by a thumping great margin of nearly two to one? That tremor we all felt coming out of Dublin Castle represented nothing less than a political earthquake.

For, in a very real sense, today’s referendum result is freighted with implications not only for queerfolk in Ireland and around the world but also for the institutional power and indeed, the magisterium itself of the Roman Catholic Church.

Just a generation ago, until 1993, homosexuality was outlawed in the Republic, and legalization occurred only over the objections of the Roman Catholic Church. The power of the Roman Church in Ireland continues to be a major factor in the political life of the Republic. And while gay members of Dáil Éireann have occasionally scored deliciously witty and typically Irish points off Roman Catholic prelates by noting that “the Archbishop may know a great deal about Saints, but he knows nothing at all about fairies,” it had nonetheless been thought that the well-nigh immovable power of the Church would suffice either to scuttle the referendum altogether or ensure a margin of victory so narrow as to raise questions about the legitimacy of a victory for marriage equality or lay foundation for an effort to repeal.

For the Irish electorate to say “yes” to marriage equality and, by corollary implication, to say “no” to the Roman Catholic Church suggests that the political development of the Irish people may have turned a corner from which there can be no actual turning back. Like a child passing from toddler age to the age of reason, the Irish people may have decisively let go of the guiding hand of Mother Church. Indeed, by adopting marriage equality by so convincing a margin, Ireland may just have sent a more powerful admonitory message to the Vatican than the famously anti-clerical and secular Italians have ever managed.  Moreover, the Irish victory for marriage equality should send a message to American conservatives that the world is changing around them, and that Ireland's convincing embrace of marriage equality is a significant warning that their own position is not as strong as they might think.

And if this is the case, the significance of Ireland's vote cannot be overstated. For 700 dark years, the Roman Catholic Church, often horribly persecuted, chivvied, put upon, forced underground, and generally made unwelcome, functioned as the crucial repository of Irish nationhood. During the years of English occupation and Protestant Ascendancy, to be authentically Irish was to cleave to the persecuted faith of one’s ancestors. To be authentically Irish was to embrace with fierce devotion all of the teachings the hedge priests and the fugitive bishops could impart to flocks of faithful Roman Catholic communicants who were, in their own country, as sheep among hungry coyotes.

Indeed, even to this day, the Roman church enjoys something of a privileged position in Irish law, being mentioned in the Constitution of the Republic as the church of the “great majority” of the people. For generations, the Church’s privileged position in Irish law also conferred upon her something of a privileged position Irish politics. Yet, in the run-up to this referendum, not a single Irish political party took an official position in opposition, not even Fianna Fáil, the opposition, Church-allied, center-right party which controls 20 seats in Dáil, and which had been expected to take up the cudgels against the referendum.

Of course of the lack of organized opposition from any Irish political party probably won’t matter a whole lot to conservatives in the United States. While the right wing freakout has yet to take shape, we know that it won’t be long in coming. Given the importance of the Irish diaspora in American politics, and given the fact that even our African-American president Barack Obama has some ancestral ties to the Emerald Isle, cultural conservative, presumably Republican, reaction in this country will be as inevitable as Atlantic breakers pounding upon the granite pinnacles of Skellig Michael.

And that conservative reaction will take a somewhat predictable form. American conservatives, unable to rage against unelected judges “inflicting” gay marriage upon the Irish body politic, will no doubt content themselves with Rumsfeldian dismissals of the Republic as part of “Old Europe.” Old Europe, indeed, that cesspit of socialism and sodomy, which we godly Americans would, in the conservative view, be well advised to abandon to the tender mercies of the manly Russians and their manly leader, manly man Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. No doubt, American conservatives will let fly with a whole series of ultimately irrelevant observations about the state of the Irish economy, about how gay marriage will be a stalking horse for ISIS, and how the Irish can no longer be regarded as the kind of people with whom we should have any truck.

But for these few hours, before the ugliness of American politics rears its head, as I look at my window and see flying the tricolor of the Irish Republic which I raised on the pole in front of my house this morning, I can feel immensely, enormously proud of the people of Ireland. I can feel unapologetic for the lump in my throat and the happy tears in my eyes.

For today Ireland resumes her ancient role as teacher; today Ireland stands again as a light among the nations.

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Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms as a member of the city Council. Though he has a name so typically French that it appears scores, even hundreds, of times in any given French phonebook, he is nonetheless a member of the Irish diaspora. He was also one of the first attorneys ever to take on a marriage case in the state of California, back in 1993. This column is not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.

AFTER CHARLIE HEBDO: THE APOLOGETIC COWARDICE OF THE WESTERN MEDIA

Summary: as nearly a million Parisians and an estimated 40 world leaders march today in homage to the memory of the Charlie Hebdo massacre victims, a growing cleavage is emerging between those who march and those in the chattering classes who seem more busy finding excuses for blaming the victims and pontificating on how tasteless, offensive, and all round icky their work was, as if freedom of expression were a Western value so hedged about with conditions, caveats, and expressions as to be virtually meaningless.  The cowardice of many English-language media outlets, including CNN, the AP, NPR, and the New York Times, to say nothing of many digital media outlets as well, has been appalling to see.  Equally appalling has been the implication coming out of many of these English-language media that we who have been outraged by what happened, from Salman Rushdie and Bill Maher to the average Frenchman or Frenchwoman demonstrating in the streets of Paris, are somehow a bunch of Islamophobic, racist, cryptofascists.  If this is the way in which many of our English-language media defend the most important Western value there is, we won’t have a West to defend for much longer.

As Parisians march in their hundreds of thousands in homage to the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a growing cleavage is emerging between what may be called the “Western Street,” which has shown its outrage and solidarity after the terrorist outrages against Parisian satire magazine Charlie Hebdo on one side, and opinionators and media outlets in much of the English-speaking world which have been busily promulgating a victim-blaming narrative, on the other.

Frankly, the performance of much of the English-speaking media, whether traditional or online, has been remarkably craven.  Many English-speaking media outlets have shown a disturbing willingness to engage in a kind of American rape culture enterprise of blaming the victims, while others have apparently been too prudish to share with their constituencies images of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons which apparently offended certain Islamist extremists to the point of terrorism.

The list of media cowards is long and inclusive.  The New York Times and NPR apparently decided that their constituencies were too infantile to be trusted with the information in question.  The New Yorker, too, was also quick to take a judgmental tone against the victims.  NPR’s attempt at explaining itself was particularly and insultingly condescending.  Citing their so-called “high bar” NPR, in effect, said “we decide what you children should be allowed to see and hear.”

Among the online media, numerous websites rushed to judge the victims and to imply that because the Charlie Hebdo work product had somehow been “icky,” “tasteless,” or “offensive,” or because it ruffled the amour propre of the bien pensant, the Charlie Hebdo victims somehow deserved it and had it coming, and that the outrage of the civilized world — and our sympathy for the victims — was somehow not only misplaced, but also outright wrong, and that those of us who were outraged by what happened are little better than white, racist, Islamophobic, crypto-fascists.

What’s worse, many of the handwringing, profoundly illiberal commentators who have eagerly taken up the trope that the Charlie Hebdo victims somehow got what they deserved are the same kind of people who regularly get themselves worked up into conniptions over what they have defined as “Rape Culture.”  Would Vox.com, Slate.com, The Daily Beast, NPR, the New Yorker, and various other English-language media outlets that have covered themselves with dishonor this week ever allow themselves to be complicit in blaming rape victims?  I expect that the answer would not only not only be "no," but that these outlets would blare forth with a full throated emphatic “no.”

But while it’s not okay to blame rape victims, it apparently is perfectly permissible to do that very thing to the Charlie Hebdo victims.  Commentators, pundits, and bloviators on social media have all lined up to hold the Charlie Hebdo victims responsible for what many of them see as a whole catalog of Western villainy toward the poor, much put upon, Muslim Ummah.  As much as American Republicans spent most of 2013 and 2014 screaming “Benghazi!”  at anything President Obama said or did, English-language media opinionators have spent the last several days screaming “drones!”  “Abu Ghraib,” “CIA!” or any of a variety of other proper nouns intended to act as shorthand for a litany of grievances some parts of the Islamic community nurture against the West.  Hell, I’ve even seen apologists for the terrorists invoking the CIA-assisted overthrow of Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh more than half a century ago, proffered as justification for this act of mass murder.

If the assassinations of January 7 ((les evenements du 7 Janvier) have been a litmus test of how the English-language media defend the very value of free expression those media so routinely invoke with a view to evading accountability for frequent acts of journalistic malpractice such as the ones in which they have recently been engaged, then much of the English-language media have failed dismally to defend the nonnegotiable Western value of free expression at a time when a wholehearted, unapologetic, uncompromising defense thereof should have been expected, nay, demanded.

Instead, many English-language media, particularly here in the United States, have made a fundamental error.  By explicitly linking what they consider the objectionable content of Charlie Hebdo’s work product with the murders, they have managed to muddy the issue and to create a clear impression that most American English-language media outlets are prepared to see free expression as a highly conditional value, hedged about with so many conditions, caveats, and exceptions that it means nothing at all.

Yet, as Americans, as citizens of one of the most diverse societies in human history, we don’t have the luxury of seeing free expression as a limited or negotiable Western liberal value.

Free expression isnt just a part of what we are; it is entirely what we are. 

As Justice Louis D Brandeis observed so famously, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies [of “offensive” speech]..., the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” Whitney v. California (1927) 274 U.S. 357, Brandeis, J., concurring at 377.  If the cure for offensive speech is more speech, then our cowards  in the media should stop justifying terrorism by characterizing speech as “offensive.” and thus presumptively unworthy of protection

My freedom to write this blog, and to share with my readers the concerns I have as an out gay man, is a direct function of our long-standing American commitment to the nonnegotiable Western liberal value of free expression.  It’s not “free expression, but...,” it’s free expression altogether, unconditional, warts-and-all, damn-the-torpedoes, no-holds-barred free speech.

In my previous post, I mentioned that Salman Rushdie, who can probably speak with more moral authority on the issue of being threatened and proscribed than any author currently living, made two powerful points.  First, he declared that we in the West must not yield “a fucking inch” on freedom of expression.  Second, he decried what he called the “But Brigade,” of people who believe in free speech, but...: “Free speech is fine, but...,” “Freedom of the press is fine, but...,” “Free expression is wonderful, but....”

Unfortunately, the But Brigade, made up of people who can’t or won’t stand up for what is perhaps the core value of our entire Western liberal experience, seems to be controlling too damn much of the narrative.  Either we stand up for free expression, or we don’t.  Either we say to the terrorists this far and no further, or we don’t.  Either we commit to the Western values we all take for granted, or we don’t.

And if we don’t vigorously defend our Western liberal values, we sure as hell won’t have for much longer a West to defend, or to bequeath to the next generation.

 It’s a shame the craven ones of so much of our Western media don’t understand that. 

Je suis toujours Charlie!

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DON’T GIVE A F–KING INCH

Summary:  It’s been just three days since the Islamist massacre of staffers at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.  While much of the civilized world has reacted with outrage, apologists for the murders have begun to emerge.  Some of them are predictable Islamist screamers.  But more disturbingly, many are illiberal Western pundits and politicians, members of what Salman Rushdie calls the “But Brigade,” whose commitment to the core, Gladstonian liberal Western value of free expression is so riddled with caveats, conditions, and exceptions as to be practically nonexistent.  As much as we in the West need to take a firm stand against Islamist extremism, we also need to take a firm stand against cowards and fifth columnists in our own camp who seem more afraid of being thought impolite or of “offending” Muslims than of being held in justified contempt for jettisoning Western values.  Je suis toujours Charlie.

Certain Western liberal values ought to be nonnegotiable.  Chief among them is freedom of expression.  Right up there with freedom of expression is the right to be free from overbearing, statist intrusion into our private lives.

Sadly, there are an awful lot of people who simply aren’t willing to stand up to put forward a full throated defense of such basic, core Western liberal values.  Some are thin-skinned Islamists, and their predictable pro-terrorist reactions can be discarded at once.  However, some of those who cannot or will not stand up for free expression call themselves “progressive.” Certainly these so-called progressives do not share a lot of political belief structure with those who call themselves conservative.  But while I would never call such tiresome pundits as Vox.com’s Ezra Klein conservative, I do find the so-called “non-ideological wonk” to be tiresomely illiberal, and equally tiresomely lacking in even the slightest courage of Western conviction.

Speaking last night on Real Time with Bill Maher, author and onetgime Khomeini fatwa target Salman Rushdie fearlessly delivered a full throated defense of free expression.  Flinging the gauntlet at the feet of thin-skinned Islamists for whom the slightest offense to their amour propre is an open invitation to murder, Rushdie suggested that what the West can do is “not give a fucking inch" on free expression.

Moreover, Rushdie also indicted, in civil yet scathing terms, what he called the “But Brigade,” of Western apologists for whom freedom of expression is fine, as long as it doesn’t offend the so-called Islamic Ummah.  “Free speech is fine, but....” “Freedom of expression is fine, but....” “Political cartoons are fine, but....” In gentle, measured tones, Salman Rushdie poured down a whole universe of contempt upon illiberal, finger wagging Westerners whose willingness to blame the murdered staffers at Charlie Hebdo, and to suggest that they were responsible for the terrorist outrage by which they were cut off, has more or less permanently put such once esteemed organizations as the New York Times on my more or less permanent shit list.  Numerous American media outlets, including CNN, AP, and the Gray Lady, caved to fear of Islamist objections and declined to reproduce the cartoons which the terrorists had found so objectionable.  The Washington Post, at least, had the balls to publish.

Thus, when I read in Vox.com a post from Matthew Yglesias denouncing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons as “scabrous,” and “offensive,” works that should not have been published, I knew that I was dealing with a card-carrying, self-loathing, weak-kneed outlet of the But Brigade.  I knew that I was dealing with people who do not, and will never, have the first shred of courage of basic Western conviction.

 Now I know that bien pensant, politically correct, yet profoundly illiberal so-called progressives will want to read me out with bell, book, and candle.  For, sadly, there are simply too many illiberal cowards on the progressive side of the aisle, for whom apologizing for the West has become second nature.  These are the kind of people who, in 1982, were busy castigating Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom for having the effrontery to resist by force Argentina’s unlawful takeover of the Falklands. 

We now know that Buenos Aries’s ultimately foolish decision to try to possess itself of the islands it called the Malvinas was based on a calculation that the mettle of the West was played out, and that Whitehall and HMG would be satisfied with a limp protest in the UN and few tame, short-term economic sanctions.  When the Royal Navy and the British Army administered condign punishment to the Argentine junta, it sent shudders through Moscow and Beijing, for it had the effect of signaling to a jaded world that the long, bloody-nosed retreat of the West could no longer be taken for granted.

When Seal Team Six blew Osama bin Laden to hell in his hidey hole in Abbottabad, it was a victory for the West every bit as consequential as Britain’s Falklands victory three decades before.  Yet, in both the Falklands and in Abbottabad, there were the usual legions of apologists, eager to suggest that London and Washington had “gone too far,” that two of the most consequential Western powers had somehow lost the right to defend themselves and the larger West of which both United Kingdom and United States are part.

We see the same kind of handwringing and pearl clutching over the Charlie Hebdo outrages.  When the But Brigade starts emerging from its sewers to wag fingers at the dead and to find reasons to give excuses to the Islamist terrorists who committed this outrageous deed, we know that there is something still very wrong in the West.  When will we in the West have the courage not only to say to the terrorists “not one fucking inch,” but also when will we in the West reclaim the courage of our own conviction that freedom of expression is a nonnegotiable Western liberal value?

At our best, we of the West are not only Burkean conservatives, but we are also Gladstonian liberals.  Like the great Prime Minister William Gladstone, we of the West must dare to insist that our ways are good, that our values are noble and honorable, and that when enemies of such critical liberal values as free expression raise their hands to strike us and our values down, we will fight.  Instead of crapping ourselves and insulting the memory of the victims of January 7, we should take new inspiration from an old Ulster Unionist slogan: the West will fight and the West will be right. 

Not a fucking inch, not a fucking inch to the terrorists, and not a fucking inch to the cowards among us who are unprepared or unwilling to stand up for Western liberal values. 

Not one fucking inch.

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AMID THE HUMBUG, THE SAVIOR IS AT HAND.

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.

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-

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-