Summary: that Palm Springs city Council hopeful Geoff Kors has been able to raise nearly $150k in campaign contributions during the first six months of this year is a tribute to his skill at political fundraising, but also raises significant questions about the extent to which access to elected public service in Palm Springs is hedged about with class and racial accessibility barriers. When a council campaign in a city smaller than Cathedral City can be expected to cost on the order of $300,000, there is a very clear message that public service is only for the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. Latinos and other people of color, working people and the middle class, need not apply. Will Palm Springs be shocked by the price tag for public service and enact "reforms?" Will those "reforms" have the usual-for-Palm Springs effect of rigging the system in favor of incumbents and wealthy candidates? Will the city fathers and mothers in Palm Springs, as before, pull the ladder of success up behind them?
Last week, our local Gannett newspaper reported that Palm Springs city Council hopeful Geoff Kors had received $147,343 in campaign contributions during the first six months of calendar 2015.
Obviously, Kors is very, very good at raising money. Props to him from a purely pragmatic political perspective; certainly he shows mad skills at political fundraising. To be able to raise that kind of money, even from a Palm Springs demographic where residents simply have more discretionary money to throw around, is not unimpressive. I have some personal experience from which I can speak; during my first and victorious run four city Council in Cathedral City, in 2002, I was victorious on a grand total of roughly $10,000 in cash and $3000 in in-kind contributions. On 13K, I was able to run a successful campaign.
But as effective as Geoff Kors is in raising money, it’s still fair to ask what kind of message the substantial campaign price tags we routinely encounter in Palm Springs elections may be sending. If we extrapolate the rate at which Mr. Kors has been raising money out till November, he will have raised nearly $300,000 in order to secure election to a city Council seat in a smaller city than Cathedral City, where the salary is still quite nominal.
When city Council races begin to cost of that kind of money, public service begins to look very much like a One Percent proposition; public service looks like an occupation of One Percenters. Running for public office looks very much in Palm Springs like an enterprise limited by its nature to the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. When a council race comes in at close to $300,000, it becomes pretty clear that Latinos and other persons of color, working people, and the ordinary middle-class need not apply. What kind of race and class messages are being sent?
Now would be a good time for the residents of our Western neighboring city to take a long hard look at the extent to which they, themselves, have rigged the system in such a way that the body politic in Palm Springs has come to resemble government of the One Percent, by the One Percent, and for the One Percent.
Because there does seem to be something more than a little offputting about small town Council races being so expensive. Again, one hesitates to analogize to one’s own political experience, but it certainly goes without saying that a city council hopeful in Palm Springs with $13,000 at his or her disposal would stand absolutely no chance in a system that has been “reformed” in a way that protects incumbents and candidates with sufficient private wealth to be able either to self fund or to create a sufficiently efficient fundraising infrastructure to scare off any opponent.
And certainly, Mr. Kors’s astonishing success in raising six figures in six months, and his willingness to publicize it, bespeaks not only a high order of fundraising sophistication, but also a kind of sheer cutthroat political savvy. After all, what less- well-funded candidate would not feel some real hesitation taking on a man with a apparently unlimited fundraising ability? I don’t blame Geoff Kors for doing what the law lets him get away with doing; he himself is not the problem; he is, however, a symptom of the way in which we have allowed money to corrupt the integrity of our political system at every level.
Of course, once the election is over, and the city fathers and mothers in Palm Springs take a look at the amounts of money that were spent in what is essentially a third or fourth tier municipal election, there will no doubt be calls for some kind of campaign finance “reform.”
And yes, I do put skepticism quotes around the word “reform,” because like so many so-called reforms, any so-called campaign finance reform Palm Springs implements will be largely intended to protect incumbents and independently wealthy candidates in the future. Most so-called good government reforms wind up having the effect of penalizing the least well resourced, the least well-off, and the least well connected in any given body politic. We should expect nothing less in Palm Springs, where the city fathers and the city mothers have a history of pulling the ladder of success up behind them.
-xxx-
Nothing in the preceding is intended, and nothing in the preceding should be construed as, legal advice. The opinions stated herein are the author's own.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Bomb Away! The Moral Conundrum of Preventing 100 Million from Dying Together
Summary: Seventy years after Japan’s Shōwa Emperor broadcast to his nation his government’s decision to surrender to the Allies and bring World War II to an end, we still find ourselves conflicted over the morality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was fashionable in some circles to characterize the use of nuclear weapons as nothing more than a morally inadmissible act of mass murder, we dare not ignore the reality that as the Pacific War wound down, and as Japan braced for a land invasion, diehards within the Japanese high command were seriously advocating that the Japanese people should commit what amounted to national suicide. To the extent that their mantra, “One Hundred Million Die Together,” was known to Allied planners, as it was indeed known, it presented the Allies with a moral conundrum. Which is the least worst option? To incinerate between 100,000 and 200,000 individuals in an atomic bombing, or become complicit in a planned act of national self genocide? 70 years on, the descendents of those One Hundred Million who did not die together are alive because leaders like Harry Truman swallowed hard and gave the green light.
70 years ago today, Japan’s Shōwa Emperor broadcast his famous Gyokuon-hōsō, or Jewel Voice Speech, announcing to a stunned nation his country’s government’s decision to surrender to the Allied powers and thus bring to an end the Second World War.
Nine days earlier, what Shōwa characterized in the surrender broadcast as “a new and most cruel bomb” had been dropped on the southwestern industrial city of Hiroshima. Three days after this first atomic bomb, known as “Little Boy,” had fallen on Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb, “Fat Man,” had been dropped on the Kyūshū port city of Nagasaki.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent the first, last, and, thus far, the only combat deployments of nuclear weapons in history.
Yet, the deployments of Little Boy and Fat Man have been contentious across the last seven decades. Generations of Americans and Japanese alike have been born, lived their lives, and died under the shadow of nuclear terror. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has observed, we have yet to adequately integrate the reality of nuclear weapons into our thinking.
And because we have yet to get our mental arms adequately around the potentialities, vel non, of nuclear weapons, it has become disturbingly easy to have recourse to simplistic thinking about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Indeed, it has become a virtual trope on the American and European Left to see the Hiroshima and Nagasaki operations as morally indefensible acts of “mass murder,” singular and sui generis.
Yet, at the acknowledged risk of being flamed to a well done Hiroshima-like crisp for so saying, permit me to suggest that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while singular and ominous, may actually have had a moral dimension that we shudder to contemplate and quail from thinking about.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings have often been justified in American political discourse by noting that a land invasion of Japan would probably have cost somewhere in the vicinity of a million American dead and wounded. A land invasion of Japan might well have cost this country more casualties than she suffered in all of her other wars combined.
Yet, for many on the academic and historical Left, even speaking of potential American casualty numbers has been held inadmissible because ostensibly racist. So, permit me to preempt any claim of racism in sketching out a moral case for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by taking the Japanese point of view.
By the late spring and early summer of 1945, it had become clear to the upper reaches of the Imperial government and the military high command at Imperial headquarters that the war had taken a catastrophic turn. If, as Professor Akira Iriye has suggested, the primary emphasis of Japan’s diplomacy after roughly November, 1942 was to bring about an end to the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, then the Japanese record on that score must be accounted one of utter and complete failure. To borrow the Shōwa Emperor’s unforgettable euphemism from the Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast, “the general war situation ha[d] developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
Putting aside the euphemistic tone of the Court Japanese in which the Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast was drafted, Shōwa was speaking an understated but powerful truth. Japan’s Outer Defense Perimeter had been shattered. Saipan, the front gate of the Empire, was gone, taken almost a year prior by the Americans. Iwo Jima, an island under the direct jurisdiction of the City of Tokyo, had been in American hands since March, 1945. Okinawa Prefecture had fallen to the Americans in the latter part of the spring.
Above Japan, the Imperial skies were now the happy hunting ground of the United States Army Air Force and the United States Navy. Incendiary bombings had leveled much of Tokyo and carried off scores of thousands of Edokko (Tokyo residents). And if the Americans controlled the skies over the Empire, they also controlled the waters off its coasts. By the late spring of 1945, US battleships were carrying out routine coastal bombardments of targets from Hokkaido south to Chiba Prefecture.
A land invasion was expected in short order. East of Tokyo, where Imperial headquarters expected the initial landings to occur, defenses were being built along the beaches at Kujukurihama, but little actual work had been accomplished.
So, if the Empire lay so open to invasion, why, then, would Washington have opted to go forward with using nuclear weapons? Some in the Left have suggested that the use of nuclear weapons was intended as a shot across the bow of the Soviet Union. Yet, what makes such a view unsustainable and even borderline racist is that it does not take into account the culture of Japan, only the politics of Iosif Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Again, looking at the situation not from the point of view of the Soviets, or from the point of view of cosseted Manhattan leftists or Berkeley Bolsheviks, but from the point of view of the Japanese themselves, there existed strong reasons for the Allies to want to bring the war to a close by administering what could be called a shock to the Japanese system. If, as a common cliché holds, it is easier and less painful to take off a Band-Aid quickly, then it would be easier to bring the war to an end by deploying a weapon against which the Japanese had no powers of resistance.
For Washington was well aware of Japan’s potential powers of resistance to a land invasion of the home islands of the Empire. Having before it the examples of Saipan and Okinawa, where Japanese civilians had destroyed themselves in appalling numbers, the US government cannot have looked forward with equanimity to the prospect of a similar hecatomb occurring in the Japanese homeland proper. By way of example, it is almost impossible to go boonie stomping in Saipan, even today, without coming across the skeletal remains of Japanese civilians who opted to take their own lives rather than face the possibility of capture.
And Washington’s concern was also justified by some of the more unhinged rhetoric that had begun to emerge from Imperial headquarters. As Japan faced the possibility of invasion, some of the more over-the-top diehards within the Japanese government and military began to entertain seriously the idea of national suicide, that “one hundred million die together.”
One. Hundred. Million. Die. Together.
Who, in Washington or London, might even dare to contemplate, let alone become complicit in, so vast an act of national self-destruction? Who, in Washington or London, might not actually take seriously such rhetoric and believe that the Japanese might actually choose so horrifying a Götterdammerung, going out in a blaze of Yamato Damashii (Yamato Spirit)? Something had to be done, therefore, to talk the Japanese off the metaphorical ledge, to preempt the possibility of self genocide. Forasmuch as the civilization of the West abhors the concept of suicide or genocide, and tends to prefer to preserve life when and where possible, the prospect of 100 million Japanese dying together on a national funeral pyre was not one even the most bloodthirsty war planners on the Allied staffs were prepared to deem admissible.
To that extent, given the facts that had developed at Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, US planners realized that the successful Trinity atomic bomb test at White Sands, New Mexico, had given them a tool by which the self-destruction of the One Hundred Million might be averted. Certainly, it may seem bloodless and calculating to think in terms of trading the lives of 100,000 for those of 100 million, but can we truly say that it is immoral and inadmissible to accept lesser casualties to avoid greater ones?
Of course, it can and should be argued that the calculus of sacrificing a few lives to save many creates a moral conundrum. Yet, to all intents and purposes, the theology of the West is based on exactly such a swap. Christian theology has long postulated that God became Incarnate in Jesus Christ Who offered Himself upon the cross, a perfect sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. Now it may not be politically correct or rhetorically fashionable to invoke the death of Christ upon the Cross, but as unfashionable as such an invocation may be, it is so deeply rooted in the weltanschauung of the West as to have become a philosophically convenient shorthand. Under such circumstances, we cannot really count it immoral to accept casualties on the magnitude of a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki to countervail the possible destruction of the Japanese people altogether. Descendents of the One Hundred Million who did not die together opposing an American land invasion of the Empire may owe a debt they cannot even realize to Harry Truman, who swallowed hard and gave the green light.
And so, while we look at the historical facts from the Japanese point of view, as persons of the West, we must ultimately judge the morality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the standards of the West; with the power to bomb comes the duty to explain, to give account, and to justify before God and the planet.
To save the One Hundred Million and to prevent appalling American and allied casualties, we may have had little moral choice but to rip the metaphorical Band-Aid away as quickly as possible. Because in the end, all life matters, even if we must from time to time acknowledge that not all life can be saved.
Still, while the one time deployment of atomic weapons to bring the Pacific War to an end and to terminate the appalling suffering of the planet may have had some moral justification, there can be no justification whatsoever for doing it again.
-xxx-
Nothing in the foregoing is intended as and nothing in the foregoing should be construed as, legal advice of any kind or character.
70 years ago today, Japan’s Shōwa Emperor broadcast his famous Gyokuon-hōsō, or Jewel Voice Speech, announcing to a stunned nation his country’s government’s decision to surrender to the Allied powers and thus bring to an end the Second World War.
Nine days earlier, what Shōwa characterized in the surrender broadcast as “a new and most cruel bomb” had been dropped on the southwestern industrial city of Hiroshima. Three days after this first atomic bomb, known as “Little Boy,” had fallen on Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb, “Fat Man,” had been dropped on the Kyūshū port city of Nagasaki.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent the first, last, and, thus far, the only combat deployments of nuclear weapons in history.
Yet, the deployments of Little Boy and Fat Man have been contentious across the last seven decades. Generations of Americans and Japanese alike have been born, lived their lives, and died under the shadow of nuclear terror. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has observed, we have yet to adequately integrate the reality of nuclear weapons into our thinking.
And because we have yet to get our mental arms adequately around the potentialities, vel non, of nuclear weapons, it has become disturbingly easy to have recourse to simplistic thinking about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Indeed, it has become a virtual trope on the American and European Left to see the Hiroshima and Nagasaki operations as morally indefensible acts of “mass murder,” singular and sui generis.
Yet, at the acknowledged risk of being flamed to a well done Hiroshima-like crisp for so saying, permit me to suggest that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while singular and ominous, may actually have had a moral dimension that we shudder to contemplate and quail from thinking about.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings have often been justified in American political discourse by noting that a land invasion of Japan would probably have cost somewhere in the vicinity of a million American dead and wounded. A land invasion of Japan might well have cost this country more casualties than she suffered in all of her other wars combined.
Yet, for many on the academic and historical Left, even speaking of potential American casualty numbers has been held inadmissible because ostensibly racist. So, permit me to preempt any claim of racism in sketching out a moral case for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by taking the Japanese point of view.
By the late spring and early summer of 1945, it had become clear to the upper reaches of the Imperial government and the military high command at Imperial headquarters that the war had taken a catastrophic turn. If, as Professor Akira Iriye has suggested, the primary emphasis of Japan’s diplomacy after roughly November, 1942 was to bring about an end to the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, then the Japanese record on that score must be accounted one of utter and complete failure. To borrow the Shōwa Emperor’s unforgettable euphemism from the Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast, “the general war situation ha[d] developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
Putting aside the euphemistic tone of the Court Japanese in which the Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast was drafted, Shōwa was speaking an understated but powerful truth. Japan’s Outer Defense Perimeter had been shattered. Saipan, the front gate of the Empire, was gone, taken almost a year prior by the Americans. Iwo Jima, an island under the direct jurisdiction of the City of Tokyo, had been in American hands since March, 1945. Okinawa Prefecture had fallen to the Americans in the latter part of the spring.
Above Japan, the Imperial skies were now the happy hunting ground of the United States Army Air Force and the United States Navy. Incendiary bombings had leveled much of Tokyo and carried off scores of thousands of Edokko (Tokyo residents). And if the Americans controlled the skies over the Empire, they also controlled the waters off its coasts. By the late spring of 1945, US battleships were carrying out routine coastal bombardments of targets from Hokkaido south to Chiba Prefecture.
A land invasion was expected in short order. East of Tokyo, where Imperial headquarters expected the initial landings to occur, defenses were being built along the beaches at Kujukurihama, but little actual work had been accomplished.
So, if the Empire lay so open to invasion, why, then, would Washington have opted to go forward with using nuclear weapons? Some in the Left have suggested that the use of nuclear weapons was intended as a shot across the bow of the Soviet Union. Yet, what makes such a view unsustainable and even borderline racist is that it does not take into account the culture of Japan, only the politics of Iosif Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Again, looking at the situation not from the point of view of the Soviets, or from the point of view of cosseted Manhattan leftists or Berkeley Bolsheviks, but from the point of view of the Japanese themselves, there existed strong reasons for the Allies to want to bring the war to a close by administering what could be called a shock to the Japanese system. If, as a common cliché holds, it is easier and less painful to take off a Band-Aid quickly, then it would be easier to bring the war to an end by deploying a weapon against which the Japanese had no powers of resistance.
For Washington was well aware of Japan’s potential powers of resistance to a land invasion of the home islands of the Empire. Having before it the examples of Saipan and Okinawa, where Japanese civilians had destroyed themselves in appalling numbers, the US government cannot have looked forward with equanimity to the prospect of a similar hecatomb occurring in the Japanese homeland proper. By way of example, it is almost impossible to go boonie stomping in Saipan, even today, without coming across the skeletal remains of Japanese civilians who opted to take their own lives rather than face the possibility of capture.
And Washington’s concern was also justified by some of the more unhinged rhetoric that had begun to emerge from Imperial headquarters. As Japan faced the possibility of invasion, some of the more over-the-top diehards within the Japanese government and military began to entertain seriously the idea of national suicide, that “one hundred million die together.”
One. Hundred. Million. Die. Together.
Who, in Washington or London, might even dare to contemplate, let alone become complicit in, so vast an act of national self-destruction? Who, in Washington or London, might not actually take seriously such rhetoric and believe that the Japanese might actually choose so horrifying a Götterdammerung, going out in a blaze of Yamato Damashii (Yamato Spirit)? Something had to be done, therefore, to talk the Japanese off the metaphorical ledge, to preempt the possibility of self genocide. Forasmuch as the civilization of the West abhors the concept of suicide or genocide, and tends to prefer to preserve life when and where possible, the prospect of 100 million Japanese dying together on a national funeral pyre was not one even the most bloodthirsty war planners on the Allied staffs were prepared to deem admissible.
To that extent, given the facts that had developed at Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, US planners realized that the successful Trinity atomic bomb test at White Sands, New Mexico, had given them a tool by which the self-destruction of the One Hundred Million might be averted. Certainly, it may seem bloodless and calculating to think in terms of trading the lives of 100,000 for those of 100 million, but can we truly say that it is immoral and inadmissible to accept lesser casualties to avoid greater ones?
Of course, it can and should be argued that the calculus of sacrificing a few lives to save many creates a moral conundrum. Yet, to all intents and purposes, the theology of the West is based on exactly such a swap. Christian theology has long postulated that God became Incarnate in Jesus Christ Who offered Himself upon the cross, a perfect sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. Now it may not be politically correct or rhetorically fashionable to invoke the death of Christ upon the Cross, but as unfashionable as such an invocation may be, it is so deeply rooted in the weltanschauung of the West as to have become a philosophically convenient shorthand. Under such circumstances, we cannot really count it immoral to accept casualties on the magnitude of a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki to countervail the possible destruction of the Japanese people altogether. Descendents of the One Hundred Million who did not die together opposing an American land invasion of the Empire may owe a debt they cannot even realize to Harry Truman, who swallowed hard and gave the green light.
And so, while we look at the historical facts from the Japanese point of view, as persons of the West, we must ultimately judge the morality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the standards of the West; with the power to bomb comes the duty to explain, to give account, and to justify before God and the planet.
To save the One Hundred Million and to prevent appalling American and allied casualties, we may have had little moral choice but to rip the metaphorical Band-Aid away as quickly as possible. Because in the end, all life matters, even if we must from time to time acknowledge that not all life can be saved.
Still, while the one time deployment of atomic weapons to bring the Pacific War to an end and to terminate the appalling suffering of the planet may have had some moral justification, there can be no justification whatsoever for doing it again.
-xxx-
Nothing in the foregoing is intended as and nothing in the foregoing should be construed as, legal advice of any kind or character.
Friday, June 26, 2015
HAPPY FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES: After Marriage Equality Became a Nationwide Reality
Summary: The Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges has been a great victory for American queerfolk. I was happy for fifteen minutes. Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David can now get hitched all across America. Of course, the reaction from cultural conservatives has been predictably sulfurous, while in the queer nation we are rapidly falling into all of those things that tend to steal our victories from us. Like Democrats, we often have difficulty opening the gifts we are given, and we have a long history of winning a war but losing the peace. There will be an awful lot of credit-taking by the Official LGBT Movement, many of whose members will muscle their way to the head of the chow line to bask in glory they did nothing to earn.
Oh, my ears and whiskers!
After waiting for months for the other shoe to drop, the Supreme Court finally announced is holding in Obergefell v. Hodges, 14-556, this morning. For us queerfolk who had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, it’s a moment, and a moment only, for great celebration. I was happy for fifteen minutes.
I will leave for the labors of more astute legal analysts than I any significant analysis of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, in which he swung for the fences and hit it out of the park. But I will note that Roberts, C.J., Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, all dissented separately. Now, four separate dissents tends to undercut the power of the minority’s expression of views, and, moreover, in this case, each of the four dissents comes across less as a principled articulation of an individual jurist’s reservations or concerns about the majority view and more as a petulant statement of anger at a result the Justices in the minority knew going in that they were powerless to avert.
Indeed, only Chief Justice John Roberts’s dissent makes even the slightest effort to come across as a principled document, yet by urging what amounts to “civil disobedience” or “massive resistance” it comes close to tracking some of the more unhinged Republican advance denunciations of the majority opinion. Worse, by comparing the majority opinion to Dred Scott, Roberts impliedly equates the liberty of same-sex couples to exercise the “fundamental right” of marriage with the Peculiar Institution of Chattel Slavery. What an insult to queerfolk everywhere! That somehow my faculty to marry is the equivalent of holding African-Americans in bondage just doesn’t, and will never, compute with me.
Of course, if Roberts’ dissent was subject to its own enormities, the dissents from Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, came across as little more than foot stamping, fist-clenched arm waving. Scalia’s dissent in particular, while written in his usual pungent style, gave the impression of an epistolary temper tantrum, not a reasoned, carefully crafted dissent.
Yet, for all the sound and the fury from the four Republican Justices on the Irreconcilable Wing of the court, their anger comes across as positively reasonable compared to the almost unhinged screeds coming from the Republican side of the aisle. Predictably, presidential hopefuls of the Elephant persuasion have been carrying on, among other things, about the importance of a constitutional amendment to keep queerfolk from marrying one another, or about how Obergefell represents the death of Christian civilization. Not only are there emanations predictable, but they are, as usual, calculated to make Republicans look cartoonishly evil on this issue. Indeed, given the official reaction of the Republican Party and its fellow travelers, one may again ask why on earth any queer person would ever be a Republican?
Even so, Republicans know, far better than the Democrats, how to create and prosecute a culture war. Already, Republicans are claiming that Obergefell is this generation’s Roe v. Wade, as if the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David tying the knot was tantamount to abortion. The conflation of the so-called pro-life movement with the anti-LGBT movement is predictable from a political standpoint, but still defies logic. If, in the rhetoric of the so-called pro-life movement, “abortion stills a beating heart,” then how can it possibly be equivalent to a marriage in which “two hearts beat as one”?
Still, cultural conservatives will deploy every forensically impoverished device they can in the service of a new and orders of magnitude more bitter culture war. Perhaps one upside (beyond the enormous upside of nationwide marriage equality) to the reaction from the cultural right will be the cultural right will have no option but to stop trying to lie to us that they are simply “concerned” about “redefining” marriage, and finally admit to us that is not our marriages they hate; it’s us they hate, with the white heat of a nova. It’s us they hate and want to see dead.
Yet even if the cultural right would like to compass are vanishing under color of whatever scriptural verse they cherry pick out of Leviticus, we queerfolk will still become foolish and complacent as a result of this decision. Even though “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, remains to be done before we can even begin to think of ourselves as first-class citizens, we will be largely content over this pride weekend to prance about in our Speedos, drink our pastel cocktails, ogle one another, and generally dance on the slopes of a volcano about to erupt.
I’m reminded of the scene from the movie Midway in which Henry Fonda, as Adm. Chester Nimitz, is responding to the news that three of four Japanese carriers were burning or had been sunk. “I’d call that a great victory,” said Hal Holbrook as Cmdr. Joe Rochefort. “Trouble is, Joe,” Fonda as Nimitz replied, “I want that fourth carrier.” Will we be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier? I don’t think we will.
I don’t think we will be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier because the mavens, movers, and shakers of our so-called Movement will soon fall to fighting over who the victory belongs to. They’ll soon fall to fighting over who is entitled to take possession of the kudos, and over who can be written out of the history. Now should be a time for careful, considerate strategizing about next steps and lessons learned.
However, in the words of sometime Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, “victory knows a thousand fathers.” And each of those thousand wannabe parents will be more busy fighting to have a paternity test done that on wondering what to do as our enemies gather and plan to compass our doom. For we always seem to have these arguments when we win a fight: whose baby is victory? But if we lose something, defeat, as Galeazzo Ciano warned “is an orphan.” And so, while we wait for the results of the paternity tests on our victory, that metaphorical fourth carrier is still out there and it can still do wicked damage.
My doubts as to our ability to get it together in the wake of a great victory are not simply the opinionating of a grouchy, middle-aged contrarian. They are the doubts of somebody who has been written out of the history. They are the doubts of the attorney who took on one of the first marriage cases in California, back in 1993, when marriage wasn’t a mainstream issue. Back then, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with whatever issue was considered mainstream was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time. Both my clients and I bore many slings and arrows from the Official Movement.
So, today, the Official Movement, and the people who make it up, the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-lately-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and — let’s shame the devil and tell the truth — the star fuckers, will celebrate. People will step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.
People in the Official Movement will engage in an orgy of self-congratulation, some rhetoric will be dished out to a couple of hundred people, and then, as the sun moves behind Mount San Jacinto, the crowd will disperse to the local homosexual bars, and in 48 hours the euphoria will be gone, and the community will be back to its usual bickering, gossiping, and backbiting.
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.
Oh, my ears and whiskers!
After waiting for months for the other shoe to drop, the Supreme Court finally announced is holding in Obergefell v. Hodges, 14-556, this morning. For us queerfolk who had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, it’s a moment, and a moment only, for great celebration. I was happy for fifteen minutes.
I will leave for the labors of more astute legal analysts than I any significant analysis of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, in which he swung for the fences and hit it out of the park. But I will note that Roberts, C.J., Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, all dissented separately. Now, four separate dissents tends to undercut the power of the minority’s expression of views, and, moreover, in this case, each of the four dissents comes across less as a principled articulation of an individual jurist’s reservations or concerns about the majority view and more as a petulant statement of anger at a result the Justices in the minority knew going in that they were powerless to avert.
Indeed, only Chief Justice John Roberts’s dissent makes even the slightest effort to come across as a principled document, yet by urging what amounts to “civil disobedience” or “massive resistance” it comes close to tracking some of the more unhinged Republican advance denunciations of the majority opinion. Worse, by comparing the majority opinion to Dred Scott, Roberts impliedly equates the liberty of same-sex couples to exercise the “fundamental right” of marriage with the Peculiar Institution of Chattel Slavery. What an insult to queerfolk everywhere! That somehow my faculty to marry is the equivalent of holding African-Americans in bondage just doesn’t, and will never, compute with me.
Of course, if Roberts’ dissent was subject to its own enormities, the dissents from Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, came across as little more than foot stamping, fist-clenched arm waving. Scalia’s dissent in particular, while written in his usual pungent style, gave the impression of an epistolary temper tantrum, not a reasoned, carefully crafted dissent.
Yet, for all the sound and the fury from the four Republican Justices on the Irreconcilable Wing of the court, their anger comes across as positively reasonable compared to the almost unhinged screeds coming from the Republican side of the aisle. Predictably, presidential hopefuls of the Elephant persuasion have been carrying on, among other things, about the importance of a constitutional amendment to keep queerfolk from marrying one another, or about how Obergefell represents the death of Christian civilization. Not only are there emanations predictable, but they are, as usual, calculated to make Republicans look cartoonishly evil on this issue. Indeed, given the official reaction of the Republican Party and its fellow travelers, one may again ask why on earth any queer person would ever be a Republican?
Even so, Republicans know, far better than the Democrats, how to create and prosecute a culture war. Already, Republicans are claiming that Obergefell is this generation’s Roe v. Wade, as if the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David tying the knot was tantamount to abortion. The conflation of the so-called pro-life movement with the anti-LGBT movement is predictable from a political standpoint, but still defies logic. If, in the rhetoric of the so-called pro-life movement, “abortion stills a beating heart,” then how can it possibly be equivalent to a marriage in which “two hearts beat as one”?
Still, cultural conservatives will deploy every forensically impoverished device they can in the service of a new and orders of magnitude more bitter culture war. Perhaps one upside (beyond the enormous upside of nationwide marriage equality) to the reaction from the cultural right will be the cultural right will have no option but to stop trying to lie to us that they are simply “concerned” about “redefining” marriage, and finally admit to us that is not our marriages they hate; it’s us they hate, with the white heat of a nova. It’s us they hate and want to see dead.
Yet even if the cultural right would like to compass are vanishing under color of whatever scriptural verse they cherry pick out of Leviticus, we queerfolk will still become foolish and complacent as a result of this decision. Even though “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, remains to be done before we can even begin to think of ourselves as first-class citizens, we will be largely content over this pride weekend to prance about in our Speedos, drink our pastel cocktails, ogle one another, and generally dance on the slopes of a volcano about to erupt.
I’m reminded of the scene from the movie Midway in which Henry Fonda, as Adm. Chester Nimitz, is responding to the news that three of four Japanese carriers were burning or had been sunk. “I’d call that a great victory,” said Hal Holbrook as Cmdr. Joe Rochefort. “Trouble is, Joe,” Fonda as Nimitz replied, “I want that fourth carrier.” Will we be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier? I don’t think we will.
I don’t think we will be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier because the mavens, movers, and shakers of our so-called Movement will soon fall to fighting over who the victory belongs to. They’ll soon fall to fighting over who is entitled to take possession of the kudos, and over who can be written out of the history. Now should be a time for careful, considerate strategizing about next steps and lessons learned.
However, in the words of sometime Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, “victory knows a thousand fathers.” And each of those thousand wannabe parents will be more busy fighting to have a paternity test done that on wondering what to do as our enemies gather and plan to compass our doom. For we always seem to have these arguments when we win a fight: whose baby is victory? But if we lose something, defeat, as Galeazzo Ciano warned “is an orphan.” And so, while we wait for the results of the paternity tests on our victory, that metaphorical fourth carrier is still out there and it can still do wicked damage.
My doubts as to our ability to get it together in the wake of a great victory are not simply the opinionating of a grouchy, middle-aged contrarian. They are the doubts of somebody who has been written out of the history. They are the doubts of the attorney who took on one of the first marriage cases in California, back in 1993, when marriage wasn’t a mainstream issue. Back then, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with whatever issue was considered mainstream was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time. Both my clients and I bore many slings and arrows from the Official Movement.
So, today, the Official Movement, and the people who make it up, the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-lately-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and — let’s shame the devil and tell the truth — the star fuckers, will celebrate. People will step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.
People in the Official Movement will engage in an orgy of self-congratulation, some rhetoric will be dished out to a couple of hundred people, and then, as the sun moves behind Mount San Jacinto, the crowd will disperse to the local homosexual bars, and in 48 hours the euphoria will be gone, and the community will be back to its usual bickering, gossiping, and backbiting.
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.
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
BERNIE SANDERS’ WOMAN PROBLEM
Summary: There is an awful lot to love about Bernie Sanders. He’s a fearless warrior for America’s middle class, and it’s hard not to admire his fire, his passion, and his conviction. But Bernie has an emerging woman problem. In a time when social media have increasingly redefined the way in which American political messaging is done, the messaging that’s coming out of the Sanders campaign from supporters of Bernie Sanders on such social media as Facebook seems dated and sexist. Blaming Hillary for everything they object to about Bill’s record as President tends to reinforce the emergent feminist critique of the Sanders campaign is out of touch and disturbingly willing to traffic in sexist, anti-feminist, or even misogynist messaging. If Bernie Sanders develops a woman problem, a lot of women voters will develop a Bernie problem, and those pissed off, kissed off women voters may very well rally in large numbers to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I adore Bernie Sanders.
I admire the way he bears fearless, tribunician witness against the immiseration of the middle class by the greediest 1% among us.
I admire Bernie’s ideas, I admire his fire, and I admire his conviction.
What I don’t admire are Bernie’s supporters, who I think are going to do him some fairly serious damage.
In an emergent politics that depends heavily on social media, the downside of such social media is that it becomes possible to dig deep into the views of a particular candidate’s supporters. It becomes easy for opponents to find in the indiscreet utterances of a given candidate’s supporters a great deal of ammunition to use against the candidate. Any political consultant can tell you that Facebook is a very good place to undertake opposition research.
I’m not sure Bernie Sanders actually understands the danger to his campaign that some of his supporters represent.
Now let’s shame the devil and tell the truth, though the Democratic 2016 primary campaign has been tightening, Hillary Rodham Clinton still remains the prohibitive front runner, polling well ahead of the independent Vermont senator. This means that Bernie has something of an uphill battle before him. Moreover, truth be told, Bernie Sanders’ candidacy for the presidency of the United States is still a long shot, no matter how enthusiastic many of his supporters may be.
Unfortunately, it’s a virtual truism in partisan politics, particularly Democratic partisan politics, that supporters of longshot candidates tend to let their frustration with their own candidate’s longshot status get the better of them. On social media, the tone of the great majority of comments from Sanders supporters has been strongly negative and strongly cynical toward Sec. Clinton.
Indeed, reading some of the pro-Sanders comments on social media leads one to the conclusion that if Hillary Rodham Clinton were to walk across the waters of Washington’s Tidal Basin, Bernie Sanders’ supporters would flay her for being unable to swim. Moreover, Sec. Clinton’s often expressed support for marriage equality tends to be dismissed by the Sanders people as mere political pandering, unworthy of any consideration whatsoever.
This leaves the Sanders campaign open to charges of living down to Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
But as much as the Sanders campaign can probably get past charges of cynicism, it may have a harder time getting past the incipient feminist critique of his White House effort that it is trafficking in sexism, anti-feminism, and even misogyny.
It’s not hard to find evidentiary support for that emergent feminist critique of Bernie’s campaign. Many Sanders supporters have embraced a fairly common comment trope, belaboring Mrs. Clinton for the political record of her husband, President Clinton. To evaluate a woman, even a married woman, on the record of a man, even her husband, denies that woman’s independent existence and personhood. It denies that woman’s agency and postulates that such a woman is nothing more than a shadow or alter ego of some man.
You don’t have to be steeped in the works of Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, or Betty Friedan to know that such a view is, indeed, sexist, anti-feminist, and even misogynist. Simply put, a lot of Bernie’s campaign supporters (even the women among them) are pissing off a lot of uncommitted Democratic women by coming across as sexist, and the voter you piss off is a voter you can kiss off. If you’re a politician and your followers insult me, don’t be looking for my vote.
To the extent that Bernie Sanders’s campaign manages to piss off women voters and becomes tarred with the brush of misogyny, Sen. Sanders can kiss goodbye to his hopes of moving into the residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW in January, 2017. Simply put, Bernie needs to reach out to women in far larger numbers than he has been able to do thus far. No Democrat can hope to win the White House who does not make huge, even majority inroads into a base made up of women voters.
The numbers history of Bill Clinton’s two successful presidential campaigns and that of Barack Obama’s two victorious runs demonstrate clearly how important the gender gap is for Democrats in a presidential election. If the word gets out that Bernie Sanders has a woman problem, or that Bernie is not keeping some of his more vocal, more apparently sexist supporters in line, then Bernie Sanders will indeed have a problem with women voters.
And if Bernie has a woman problem in his campaign, women may very well wind up having a Bernie Sanders problem and making the choice to rally to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
QUEER QUISLINGS
SUMMARY: the flap over how a Longmont, Colorado charter school refused to allow gay valedictorian Evan Young to disclose his sexual orientation in a graduation speech has lit up the Internet and social media, calling forth a firestorm of comments. The school has sought to spin the whole thing as something akin to the act of a radical faerie hijacking the graduation celebration to push some kind of dangerous homosexual agenda. That straight people would buy into such a narrative is not surprising, but what’s even worse is when queerfolk do so as well. Yet, as much as Norwegian homegrown Nazi Vidkun Quisling made his name synonymous with the word “traitor,” the queer quislings who took up the cudgels against Evan have made their own point of view synonymous with self-loathing, Stockholm Syndrome nastiness. It's more than a little disheartening how many of the same queerfolk who lionized Caitlyn Jenner for courageously telling her truth lined up to excoriate Evan Young for telling his.
In recent days, there has been some controversy concerning Evan Young, the gay valedictorian of the graduating class of Twin Peaks Academy, a Longmont, Colorado charter school.
Apparently, school administrators objected to Evan’s plan to disclose in his graduation speech that he is gay. School administrators, also apparently realizing at the 13th hour how poor were the optics of their action, circled the metaphorical wagons, and appreciating that “the best defense is a strong offense,” engaged in the classic American rape culture enterprise of victim blaming, asserting that Evan had tried to hijack the event to push some kind of radical homosexual agenda, and that he had “bad character.”
Needless to say, the Internet and social media both lit up when news broke of what had transpired. Indeed, on social media, the comment threads soon became long and contentious. Most of the comments on the threads concerning the story were very supportive of Evan, and took the charter school to serious task over what appeared to be a gratuitous and homophobic decision by the school principal.
Nonetheless, the school’s effort to spin the narrative in its own favor was not completely without success. A fair number of commenters weighed in repeating variations on a common trope, that Evan had been selfish, narcissistic, or just plain wicked in “hijacking” the event to push some kind of “radical homosexual agenda.”
Repeated over and over again, such sentiments soon became an example of what American psychologist Robert Lifton referred to in his monograph on brainwashing in Red China, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, as a “thought-terminating cliché,” where a commonly accepted phrase or trope winds up being rhetorically invoked as a substitute for real argument. In short, the thought-terminating cliché is a kind of metonym, a shorthand for a concept or line of argument. In this case, the repeated invocation of the trope “not the right time and not the right place,” essentially became a cover for another, more dangerous trope: “shut up, faggot.”
Now in terms of straight people commenting on these various threads, invocation of such a trope comes as no surprise at all. A lot of the angriest rhetoric against the queer nation still comes from fearful straight people. But what has been worse is to see on these comment threads people who identify as queer eagerly embracing the charter school’s narrative. Those people, those queer critics, put me in mind of Norwegian homegrown Nazi Vidkun Quisling, whose surname has become synonymous with the word traitor. (“A gift,” the London Times chuckled editorially in 1940, “from the gods.”) Embracing the charter school’s narrative, if you happen to be queer, is problematic for a number of reasons beyond just the fact that to be a queer quisling is simply inadmissible on its terms.
First, queer quislings embracing the charter school’s narrative display and demonstrate lamentable ignorance not only of queer history, but also of the larger history of the American body politic. When Rosa Parks, that “uppity Negress,” had the effrontery to ride in the front of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, many in the African-American community criticized her for upsetting the apple cart at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Such people also were critical of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for his role in the Montgomery bus boycott that followed.
By the same token, a lot of older, more established homosexuals got themselves into hand-wringing, pearl-clutching paroxysms of prim, proper upset over the fact that it was largely drag queens and gay street kids (“not our kind, dear”) who had dared to defy the NYPD at Stonewall. That queerfolk would attack Evan for the same reason that so-called responsible Negroes in Montgomery or that the tame, respectable queer quisling homosexuals of Manhattan would have launched their barbs at Rosa Parks or at the drag queens and gay street kids of Stonewall displays an almost horrifying, terrifying ignorance of our queer history.
Second, excoriating Evan for having the courage to speak his truth reflects a kind of indifference to privilege that necessarily gives the queer nation a bad name. We have come an astonishingly long way since Stonewall. It may be that this very month, SCOTUS will rule that the United States Constitution guarantees that the right to marry extends to same gender couples. Who would have thought such a thing possible in 1969 when the street kids and the drag queens misbehaved at Stonewall? But for the tame, domesticated homosexuals, the queer quislings who think Evan Young was “too over-the-top,” a little knowledge of history and privilege ought to have militated against their saying such foolish things.
For our struggle is by no means over, and as more than one fellow trench fighter and queer activist has reminded me, we are always, always, always in the fight of our political lives. Yet the queer quislings, the tame ones, the Uncle Toms, the strident queer critics of Evan Young’s heroic graduation speech, seem far too ready to take our progress for granted, never being willing to acknowledge that progress does not depend upon tame, quiet acquiescence in existing dispensations.
Progress depends on truth tellers and hell raisers and bomb throwers, and if the queer quislings, the Stockholm Syndrome sisters, the fearful-of-straight-displeasure homosexuals who vented their vials of vitriol on Evan Young have forgotten that essential reality, then they have only themselves to blame when straight America turns upon them and re-consigns them to second-class citizenship, to the back of the American bus, or to the fearful confines of the closet.
Third, Evan Young’s homosexual and bisexual critics seem to have lost touch with what we still regard as the cardinal American virtue of truth telling. They’ve forgotten the importance of truth tellers and whistle blowers; they’ve also forgotten how much we owe to those hell raisers and bomb throwers. In a military context, for example (and here I invoke the experience of the Marine Corps, which places an extremely high premium on a culture of truth telling), the importance of truth telling can often be summed up in five simple words: when leaders lie, Marines die.
Of course, it’s not just Marines who die when leaders lie. And a lie can be a lie of silence as much is it can be a lie of affirmative misrepresentation. During the horrifying, scarifying, terrifying early years of the AIDS crisis, activist groups such as ACT-UP hit on a very simple graphic message, Silence = Death, to convey the reality that refusing to talk about AIDS helped to facilitate the transmission of the disease. Having lived through that Ragnarok time, I internalized that message right down to the marrow of my bones. In a sword age, an ax age, a wind age, a wolf age, truth telling, while sometimes “icky” to the excessively polite and the priggishly purblind, may be the only thing that ensures survival.
But it is not just the survival of the body with which we must be concerned; we must also be mindful of the survival of the soul. For the soul is constrained to lie, the soul will die. Where the soul is constrained to silence, it will languish, and where it languishes, it cannot live. For Evan Young to speak his truth was not selfish, it was not an act of hijacking, it was not an imposition upon those who had expected him to speak the truth. It was an unapologetic affirmation of life and truth. For in truth is life, and as Scripture reminds us, “the truth will set you free.” John 8:32.
Indeed, on the subject of truth telling, I find it a little disturbing how many people who have condemned Evan for courageously daring to tell his truth have rallied to and lionized Caitlyn Jenner for having the courage to tell her truth. I don’t think you get to lionize Caitlyn and line up to abuse Evan without having to face justified criticism for being a two-faced hypocrite. Caitlyn and Evan have both told their truths, and, as St. John once wrote, it has set both of them free.
And because it is so important to tell our truths and set our souls free, queerfolk dare not succumb to the temptation of seeing silence as a luxury in which we may profitably indulge, for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mark 8:36. Our queer souls are not for sale; they are not to be silenced to assuage the discomfort of the oppressor, even if the oppressor is a Stockholm Syndrome homosexual.
Fourth, one of the things that truly disturbed me, given how our movement for queer civil rights has so often been riven by gender cleavages, was the stridency of some of the lesbian condemnation of Evan Young’s truth telling. Indeed, the stridency of some of the comments from a relatively small, but vocal, minority of the lesbian commentators on social media was such as to cause me to wonder whether some of this small, vocal, minority of queer women had taken leave of their senses.
Now I don’t want anyone to jump to an automatically gendered conclusion that I am necessarily trying to “mansplain,” using male privilege to engage in an equally gendered enterprise of telling the women to be quiet. But to a certain extent, I do find much of the gendered criticism of Evan to be in a sense almost an expression of resentment that Evan, as a gay man, remains “privileged” as a male to say and do things which many lesbians still hesitate to contemplate even today. “How dare that privileged man do things which we unprivileged women can’t?”
In such a thought process is a kind of self-disempowering, self-deceiving self-identification as victim. Somehow, it appears that in the view of some of that small, vocal, minority of angry lesbians who took out after Evan Young with metaphorical pitchforks and torches, Evan is “guilty” of contributing to the male victimization of women. What makes Evan “guilty” of this gendercrime? Let us shame the devil and tell the truth: Evan’s gendercrime was to occupy a truth-telling, prophetic, shamanic space that as a male he is comfortable occupying. And to that small minority of angry lesbians with their pitchforks and torches, that makes Evan “guilty” of “asserting male privilege.”
For the truth telling space, the prophetic space, and the shamanic space have often been traditionally regarded as gendered, male-privileged places where women have not been encouraged to go, much less occupy. Indeed, through much of our history the role of the truth teller, the prophet, or the shaman has often been viewed in a gendered way as fundamentally masculine.
Because Evan went there and occupied without apology those gendered places, it does appear that some of the angrier lesbians on these comment threads have got a beef with him that can only be expressed by these women identifying themselves very publicly with the oppressor, with the one who confronts, with the one who silences. We may therefore conclude, at least tentatively, that any male in Evan Young’s position would have become an equally objectionable target in the gender wars. Apparently, the sin of “male privilege” outweighs the social virtues of courage and truth-telling, and justifies censorious queerfolk ranging themselves alongside the oppressor.
Yet, when all has been said and done, and when the sound and the fury are over, we may still take encouragement from the fact that rather more people seem to be standing with Evan Young to uplift him than seem to be standing against him to constrain him to silence. We may take encouragement from the support that has come Evan’s way for his truth-telling, his prophecy, his shamanry. It is not given that often to straight people to be truth tellers, prophets, shamans even; that space is often a place for Others, for those of us whose world is simply different.
Yet, we who are queer or gender nonconforming must, at some point in our lives, be all three, truth tellers, prophets, and shamans. To come out, whether as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or —-- as Caitlyn Jenner did so amazingly courageously the other day --— as transgendered, involves an act of existential truth telling that no one who has not done so him- or herself can ever truly comprehend.
To come out, to say those simple words “I’m gay,” or “I’m a lesbian,” or “call me Caitlyn,” is also to engage in real, authentic prophecy: because queerfolk and trans people are not alone in that endowed state of being; the role of prophet falls to us precisely because we are not alone, but rather parts of a unique and special community; we thus owe a duty of candor and of disclosure and of encouragement to the still-closeted and the un-transitioned. It is our duty to pay it forward by making it possible for our closeted or untransitioned brothers and sisters openly and forthrightly to live their truths, too. I daresay my own personal experience of coming out was probably made significantly easier by having close family members who had come out before me, and by having parents who had a large circle of queer friends.
Moreover, while my own knowledge of the transgendered community is imperfect, for I see as through a glass darkly, 1 Cor. 13:12, I think I can safely guess that, notwithstanding all the talk of privilege and politics that has accompanied her transition, Caitlyn Jenner will still be a beacon of hope to individuals wrestling with the existential question of their own gender identity.
So, even if gay valedictorian Evan Young has only a Warholian 15 minutes of fame, or even if at some future point he proves to have feet of clay, this week, he has been our teacher, reminding us that our queer struggle is yet incomplete, and that we still have “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, to do within our own community to ensure that we are neither so ignorant nor so complacent nor so gendered that we cannot rally around the next queer kid who is silenced or censored for daring to speak an existential truth that must now dare to speak its name, without quibbling from queer quislings.
Let us tell our truths boldly, for they will set us free.
-xxx-
In recent days, there has been some controversy concerning Evan Young, the gay valedictorian of the graduating class of Twin Peaks Academy, a Longmont, Colorado charter school.
Apparently, school administrators objected to Evan’s plan to disclose in his graduation speech that he is gay. School administrators, also apparently realizing at the 13th hour how poor were the optics of their action, circled the metaphorical wagons, and appreciating that “the best defense is a strong offense,” engaged in the classic American rape culture enterprise of victim blaming, asserting that Evan had tried to hijack the event to push some kind of radical homosexual agenda, and that he had “bad character.”
Needless to say, the Internet and social media both lit up when news broke of what had transpired. Indeed, on social media, the comment threads soon became long and contentious. Most of the comments on the threads concerning the story were very supportive of Evan, and took the charter school to serious task over what appeared to be a gratuitous and homophobic decision by the school principal.
Nonetheless, the school’s effort to spin the narrative in its own favor was not completely without success. A fair number of commenters weighed in repeating variations on a common trope, that Evan had been selfish, narcissistic, or just plain wicked in “hijacking” the event to push some kind of “radical homosexual agenda.”
Repeated over and over again, such sentiments soon became an example of what American psychologist Robert Lifton referred to in his monograph on brainwashing in Red China, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, as a “thought-terminating cliché,” where a commonly accepted phrase or trope winds up being rhetorically invoked as a substitute for real argument. In short, the thought-terminating cliché is a kind of metonym, a shorthand for a concept or line of argument. In this case, the repeated invocation of the trope “not the right time and not the right place,” essentially became a cover for another, more dangerous trope: “shut up, faggot.”
Now in terms of straight people commenting on these various threads, invocation of such a trope comes as no surprise at all. A lot of the angriest rhetoric against the queer nation still comes from fearful straight people. But what has been worse is to see on these comment threads people who identify as queer eagerly embracing the charter school’s narrative. Those people, those queer critics, put me in mind of Norwegian homegrown Nazi Vidkun Quisling, whose surname has become synonymous with the word traitor. (“A gift,” the London Times chuckled editorially in 1940, “from the gods.”) Embracing the charter school’s narrative, if you happen to be queer, is problematic for a number of reasons beyond just the fact that to be a queer quisling is simply inadmissible on its terms.
First, queer quislings embracing the charter school’s narrative display and demonstrate lamentable ignorance not only of queer history, but also of the larger history of the American body politic. When Rosa Parks, that “uppity Negress,” had the effrontery to ride in the front of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, many in the African-American community criticized her for upsetting the apple cart at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Such people also were critical of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for his role in the Montgomery bus boycott that followed.
By the same token, a lot of older, more established homosexuals got themselves into hand-wringing, pearl-clutching paroxysms of prim, proper upset over the fact that it was largely drag queens and gay street kids (“not our kind, dear”) who had dared to defy the NYPD at Stonewall. That queerfolk would attack Evan for the same reason that so-called responsible Negroes in Montgomery or that the tame, respectable queer quisling homosexuals of Manhattan would have launched their barbs at Rosa Parks or at the drag queens and gay street kids of Stonewall displays an almost horrifying, terrifying ignorance of our queer history.
Second, excoriating Evan for having the courage to speak his truth reflects a kind of indifference to privilege that necessarily gives the queer nation a bad name. We have come an astonishingly long way since Stonewall. It may be that this very month, SCOTUS will rule that the United States Constitution guarantees that the right to marry extends to same gender couples. Who would have thought such a thing possible in 1969 when the street kids and the drag queens misbehaved at Stonewall? But for the tame, domesticated homosexuals, the queer quislings who think Evan Young was “too over-the-top,” a little knowledge of history and privilege ought to have militated against their saying such foolish things.
For our struggle is by no means over, and as more than one fellow trench fighter and queer activist has reminded me, we are always, always, always in the fight of our political lives. Yet the queer quislings, the tame ones, the Uncle Toms, the strident queer critics of Evan Young’s heroic graduation speech, seem far too ready to take our progress for granted, never being willing to acknowledge that progress does not depend upon tame, quiet acquiescence in existing dispensations.
Progress depends on truth tellers and hell raisers and bomb throwers, and if the queer quislings, the Stockholm Syndrome sisters, the fearful-of-straight-displeasure homosexuals who vented their vials of vitriol on Evan Young have forgotten that essential reality, then they have only themselves to blame when straight America turns upon them and re-consigns them to second-class citizenship, to the back of the American bus, or to the fearful confines of the closet.
Third, Evan Young’s homosexual and bisexual critics seem to have lost touch with what we still regard as the cardinal American virtue of truth telling. They’ve forgotten the importance of truth tellers and whistle blowers; they’ve also forgotten how much we owe to those hell raisers and bomb throwers. In a military context, for example (and here I invoke the experience of the Marine Corps, which places an extremely high premium on a culture of truth telling), the importance of truth telling can often be summed up in five simple words: when leaders lie, Marines die.
Of course, it’s not just Marines who die when leaders lie. And a lie can be a lie of silence as much is it can be a lie of affirmative misrepresentation. During the horrifying, scarifying, terrifying early years of the AIDS crisis, activist groups such as ACT-UP hit on a very simple graphic message, Silence = Death, to convey the reality that refusing to talk about AIDS helped to facilitate the transmission of the disease. Having lived through that Ragnarok time, I internalized that message right down to the marrow of my bones. In a sword age, an ax age, a wind age, a wolf age, truth telling, while sometimes “icky” to the excessively polite and the priggishly purblind, may be the only thing that ensures survival.
But it is not just the survival of the body with which we must be concerned; we must also be mindful of the survival of the soul. For the soul is constrained to lie, the soul will die. Where the soul is constrained to silence, it will languish, and where it languishes, it cannot live. For Evan Young to speak his truth was not selfish, it was not an act of hijacking, it was not an imposition upon those who had expected him to speak the truth. It was an unapologetic affirmation of life and truth. For in truth is life, and as Scripture reminds us, “the truth will set you free.” John 8:32.
Indeed, on the subject of truth telling, I find it a little disturbing how many people who have condemned Evan for courageously daring to tell his truth have rallied to and lionized Caitlyn Jenner for having the courage to tell her truth. I don’t think you get to lionize Caitlyn and line up to abuse Evan without having to face justified criticism for being a two-faced hypocrite. Caitlyn and Evan have both told their truths, and, as St. John once wrote, it has set both of them free.
And because it is so important to tell our truths and set our souls free, queerfolk dare not succumb to the temptation of seeing silence as a luxury in which we may profitably indulge, for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mark 8:36. Our queer souls are not for sale; they are not to be silenced to assuage the discomfort of the oppressor, even if the oppressor is a Stockholm Syndrome homosexual.
Fourth, one of the things that truly disturbed me, given how our movement for queer civil rights has so often been riven by gender cleavages, was the stridency of some of the lesbian condemnation of Evan Young’s truth telling. Indeed, the stridency of some of the comments from a relatively small, but vocal, minority of the lesbian commentators on social media was such as to cause me to wonder whether some of this small, vocal, minority of queer women had taken leave of their senses.
Now I don’t want anyone to jump to an automatically gendered conclusion that I am necessarily trying to “mansplain,” using male privilege to engage in an equally gendered enterprise of telling the women to be quiet. But to a certain extent, I do find much of the gendered criticism of Evan to be in a sense almost an expression of resentment that Evan, as a gay man, remains “privileged” as a male to say and do things which many lesbians still hesitate to contemplate even today. “How dare that privileged man do things which we unprivileged women can’t?”
In such a thought process is a kind of self-disempowering, self-deceiving self-identification as victim. Somehow, it appears that in the view of some of that small, vocal, minority of angry lesbians who took out after Evan Young with metaphorical pitchforks and torches, Evan is “guilty” of contributing to the male victimization of women. What makes Evan “guilty” of this gendercrime? Let us shame the devil and tell the truth: Evan’s gendercrime was to occupy a truth-telling, prophetic, shamanic space that as a male he is comfortable occupying. And to that small minority of angry lesbians with their pitchforks and torches, that makes Evan “guilty” of “asserting male privilege.”
For the truth telling space, the prophetic space, and the shamanic space have often been traditionally regarded as gendered, male-privileged places where women have not been encouraged to go, much less occupy. Indeed, through much of our history the role of the truth teller, the prophet, or the shaman has often been viewed in a gendered way as fundamentally masculine.
Because Evan went there and occupied without apology those gendered places, it does appear that some of the angrier lesbians on these comment threads have got a beef with him that can only be expressed by these women identifying themselves very publicly with the oppressor, with the one who confronts, with the one who silences. We may therefore conclude, at least tentatively, that any male in Evan Young’s position would have become an equally objectionable target in the gender wars. Apparently, the sin of “male privilege” outweighs the social virtues of courage and truth-telling, and justifies censorious queerfolk ranging themselves alongside the oppressor.
Yet, when all has been said and done, and when the sound and the fury are over, we may still take encouragement from the fact that rather more people seem to be standing with Evan Young to uplift him than seem to be standing against him to constrain him to silence. We may take encouragement from the support that has come Evan’s way for his truth-telling, his prophecy, his shamanry. It is not given that often to straight people to be truth tellers, prophets, shamans even; that space is often a place for Others, for those of us whose world is simply different.
Yet, we who are queer or gender nonconforming must, at some point in our lives, be all three, truth tellers, prophets, and shamans. To come out, whether as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or —-- as Caitlyn Jenner did so amazingly courageously the other day --— as transgendered, involves an act of existential truth telling that no one who has not done so him- or herself can ever truly comprehend.
To come out, to say those simple words “I’m gay,” or “I’m a lesbian,” or “call me Caitlyn,” is also to engage in real, authentic prophecy: because queerfolk and trans people are not alone in that endowed state of being; the role of prophet falls to us precisely because we are not alone, but rather parts of a unique and special community; we thus owe a duty of candor and of disclosure and of encouragement to the still-closeted and the un-transitioned. It is our duty to pay it forward by making it possible for our closeted or untransitioned brothers and sisters openly and forthrightly to live their truths, too. I daresay my own personal experience of coming out was probably made significantly easier by having close family members who had come out before me, and by having parents who had a large circle of queer friends.
Moreover, while my own knowledge of the transgendered community is imperfect, for I see as through a glass darkly, 1 Cor. 13:12, I think I can safely guess that, notwithstanding all the talk of privilege and politics that has accompanied her transition, Caitlyn Jenner will still be a beacon of hope to individuals wrestling with the existential question of their own gender identity.
So, even if gay valedictorian Evan Young has only a Warholian 15 minutes of fame, or even if at some future point he proves to have feet of clay, this week, he has been our teacher, reminding us that our queer struggle is yet incomplete, and that we still have “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, to do within our own community to ensure that we are neither so ignorant nor so complacent nor so gendered that we cannot rally around the next queer kid who is silenced or censored for daring to speak an existential truth that must now dare to speak its name, without quibbling from queer quislings.
Let us tell our truths boldly, for they will set us free.
-xxx-
Thursday, May 28, 2015
FOOLISH AMERICANS: The Aftermath of Ireland's Historic Marriage Referendum
Summary: The reaction of both the ‘Murican right and the American left to Ireland’s marriage equality referendum has brought little credit to either side of the American political discourse. While ‘Murican cultural conservatives have been having conniptions over marriage equality coming to the Emerald Isle, American progressives have been waving censorious fingers at the Irish for having put marriage equality up to a vote, because in America, “we don’t vote on rights, that’s why they’re called rights.” Yet America and Ireland do not share the same political DNA. In America, making an additional place at the national table for a hitherto despised minority can’t happen by a vote; all of our history of racial insecurity militates too powerfully against it. By contrast, Ireland, which was never hobbled by the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery and all of the racial foolishness and angst which accompanied it, is far better situated than the United States to put marriage equality to a vote, and American progressives’ criticism of the Republic comes across as condescending and culturally imperialistic.
There is an old cliché in politics that you must be doing something right if you are managing to pass off both the right and the left.
It certainly seems that the Irish managed to get things very right by voting, nearly two-to-one, to add a marriage equality clause to the Constitution of the Irish Republic. It's got both sides of the American political divide into knicker-knotting orgies of censorious finger-pointing.
'Murican cultural conservatives quickly got their knickers in knots, swinging into a full-on conniption over the awful thing the Irish had done, over how Ireland had managed, once again, to prove to all God-fearing 'Muricans that Ireland, and the “Old Europe” of which Ireland is part, is nothing but a cesspit of socialism and sodomy, unworthy of being defended by 'Murica against the manly Russians and their manly leader, manly man Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Aside from the foolishness of engaging in a love feast for Vladimir Putin, 'Murican conservatives only managed to reinforce the strong negative view of the United States now held by most of the other industrialized nations of the West. By flinging cherry-picked Bible verses at the Irish people, vilifying and damnifying them for daring to embrace the principle of marriage equality, 'Murican cultural conservatives shed more heat than light. Apparently Georges Clemenceau was right to describe the United States as the only society that has managed to go from barbarism to decadence without the customary, intervening interval of civilization.
But if 'Murican cultural conservatives managed to make fools of themselves and reflect badly on their country, the American left has also not exactly covered itself with glory in its comments upon Ireland’s marriage equality referendum. Almost uniformly, American progressives lined up to criticize Ireland for adopting marriage equality by way of a referendum. The standard trope, “you don’t vote on rights, that’s why they’re called rights,” has been quoted now so many times as to become nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché.
For American progressives to complain about the methodology by which Ireland adopted marriage equality comes across not only as parochial, but somewhat culturally imperialistic as well. We Americans should remember that Ireland has a rather different political system from our own. Ireland is not a federation made up of numerous several, sovereign states. Ireland is a unitary Republic, whose 26 counties are merely political subdivisions of the larger body politic. Thus, for Americans to complain about marriage equality coming through a referendum bespeaks a certain ignorance, even a certain condescension. Ireland’s constitution is not amended through ratification by a specified fraction of the 26 Counties of the Republic, but through the uncoerced suffrage of the whole population of the Republic.
So, while I can understand the concern of some American legal analysts that Ireland’s marriage equality referendum might give ammunition to the argument that marriage equality should be decided in the United States by popular vote, the separate political histories of our two countries ought to remind us of how completely different the dynamics really are. Ireland, despite substantial amounts of immigration from Eastern Europe and North Africa, still remains a largely homogeneous society, a society composed of women and men whose ancestors have usually occupied the Emerald Isle for tens, even scores or hundreds of generations. The same cannot be said of the United States, which is well on its way to becoming a minority-majority society.
And, in many ways, it has been American discomfort over our transition from a white-majority to a minority-majority society that has driven many of the fears and insecurities which in their turn have fueled opposition to marriage equality in this country. Moreover, Ireland, though not without her own traumas and anguish, never had to contend with the original sin of our own American Union, the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery. Because slavery was a constitutionally protected, integral part of the American body politic at the time of our foundation, the ability of American society to integrate minorities, to include the different, to make room at the national table for the Other, has always been somewhat compromised. For us, voting to make a place for the Other at the national table has never been nearly as realistic an option as it has been for the Irish.
For Ireland, the greatest hurdle to be overcome was not a whole series of race-based fears and Freudian foibles, but what had been viewed as the well-nigh insurmountable opposition of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, as Dublin Abp. Diarmuid Martin observed in the wake of the vote, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland needs “a reality check,” it needs, the archbishop added, to get beyond being “the church of the like-minded.” At all events, it does appear, as has been observed among all the chattering classes, that the days of Ireland being a virtual colony of the Vatican are over.
And if, for Ireland, the original sin of the Republic was its excessive identification as a Catholic society, the expungement of that sin has been accomplished with surprising ease, and with a measure of grace Americans would never have imagined. So, to borrow the words of the late constitutional scholar and novelist Walter F. Murphy, it appears that the Irish, having had the church on their backs for so long, are not prepared to let it get on their consciences any longer. And if the Irish have managed to slough the church off the back of the Irish body politic, they certainly are in advance of this country, where our political obsession with Christian religion has precipitated us onto a headlong flight away from the Enlightenment and back toward the Dark Ages
So, because Ireland’s body politic exhibits so many historic, even DNA-based differences from our own, and because Ireland is no longer nearly so poisoned by ostentatious, politicized religion as are we, American progressives need to stop making themselves look as foolish as their cultural conservative counterparts. The entire world does not function according to American norms, a reality we forget at our peril.
There is an old cliché in politics that you must be doing something right if you are managing to pass off both the right and the left.
It certainly seems that the Irish managed to get things very right by voting, nearly two-to-one, to add a marriage equality clause to the Constitution of the Irish Republic. It's got both sides of the American political divide into knicker-knotting orgies of censorious finger-pointing.
'Murican cultural conservatives quickly got their knickers in knots, swinging into a full-on conniption over the awful thing the Irish had done, over how Ireland had managed, once again, to prove to all God-fearing 'Muricans that Ireland, and the “Old Europe” of which Ireland is part, is nothing but a cesspit of socialism and sodomy, unworthy of being defended by 'Murica against the manly Russians and their manly leader, manly man Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Aside from the foolishness of engaging in a love feast for Vladimir Putin, 'Murican conservatives only managed to reinforce the strong negative view of the United States now held by most of the other industrialized nations of the West. By flinging cherry-picked Bible verses at the Irish people, vilifying and damnifying them for daring to embrace the principle of marriage equality, 'Murican cultural conservatives shed more heat than light. Apparently Georges Clemenceau was right to describe the United States as the only society that has managed to go from barbarism to decadence without the customary, intervening interval of civilization.
But if 'Murican cultural conservatives managed to make fools of themselves and reflect badly on their country, the American left has also not exactly covered itself with glory in its comments upon Ireland’s marriage equality referendum. Almost uniformly, American progressives lined up to criticize Ireland for adopting marriage equality by way of a referendum. The standard trope, “you don’t vote on rights, that’s why they’re called rights,” has been quoted now so many times as to become nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché.
For American progressives to complain about the methodology by which Ireland adopted marriage equality comes across not only as parochial, but somewhat culturally imperialistic as well. We Americans should remember that Ireland has a rather different political system from our own. Ireland is not a federation made up of numerous several, sovereign states. Ireland is a unitary Republic, whose 26 counties are merely political subdivisions of the larger body politic. Thus, for Americans to complain about marriage equality coming through a referendum bespeaks a certain ignorance, even a certain condescension. Ireland’s constitution is not amended through ratification by a specified fraction of the 26 Counties of the Republic, but through the uncoerced suffrage of the whole population of the Republic.
So, while I can understand the concern of some American legal analysts that Ireland’s marriage equality referendum might give ammunition to the argument that marriage equality should be decided in the United States by popular vote, the separate political histories of our two countries ought to remind us of how completely different the dynamics really are. Ireland, despite substantial amounts of immigration from Eastern Europe and North Africa, still remains a largely homogeneous society, a society composed of women and men whose ancestors have usually occupied the Emerald Isle for tens, even scores or hundreds of generations. The same cannot be said of the United States, which is well on its way to becoming a minority-majority society.
And, in many ways, it has been American discomfort over our transition from a white-majority to a minority-majority society that has driven many of the fears and insecurities which in their turn have fueled opposition to marriage equality in this country. Moreover, Ireland, though not without her own traumas and anguish, never had to contend with the original sin of our own American Union, the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery. Because slavery was a constitutionally protected, integral part of the American body politic at the time of our foundation, the ability of American society to integrate minorities, to include the different, to make room at the national table for the Other, has always been somewhat compromised. For us, voting to make a place for the Other at the national table has never been nearly as realistic an option as it has been for the Irish.
For Ireland, the greatest hurdle to be overcome was not a whole series of race-based fears and Freudian foibles, but what had been viewed as the well-nigh insurmountable opposition of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, as Dublin Abp. Diarmuid Martin observed in the wake of the vote, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland needs “a reality check,” it needs, the archbishop added, to get beyond being “the church of the like-minded.” At all events, it does appear, as has been observed among all the chattering classes, that the days of Ireland being a virtual colony of the Vatican are over.
And if, for Ireland, the original sin of the Republic was its excessive identification as a Catholic society, the expungement of that sin has been accomplished with surprising ease, and with a measure of grace Americans would never have imagined. So, to borrow the words of the late constitutional scholar and novelist Walter F. Murphy, it appears that the Irish, having had the church on their backs for so long, are not prepared to let it get on their consciences any longer. And if the Irish have managed to slough the church off the back of the Irish body politic, they certainly are in advance of this country, where our political obsession with Christian religion has precipitated us onto a headlong flight away from the Enlightenment and back toward the Dark Ages
So, because Ireland’s body politic exhibits so many historic, even DNA-based differences from our own, and because Ireland is no longer nearly so poisoned by ostentatious, politicized religion as are we, American progressives need to stop making themselves look as foolish as their cultural conservative counterparts. The entire world does not function according to American norms, a reality we forget at our peril.
Monday, May 25, 2015
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.”
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.”
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