Gay Marriage May Bring Boom to NJ. My friend Joe in Belleville (NJ) emailed me a November 26th opinion piece in the New York Daily News titled "Gay rights could pay big dividends", in which Richard Florida and Gary Gates suggest that if New Jersey's Legislature enacts civil unions for same-sex couples, and especially if it authorizes gay "marriage" as such, a lot of gay people now living in New York could pick up stakes and move to New Jersey, bringing their talents, and money, to the Garden State.

This will be a big deal — not just for same-sex couples, but for New Jersey's economy.

Why? Because, despite some rumblings in Albany, New York is likely to be years away from allowing same-sex marriage or civil unions. That will give [New] Jersey a serious competitive advantage in attracting gay couples and the economic benefits associated with their calling a place home.

A forthcoming study by UCLA's Williams Institute finds that revenue from weddings and wedding tourism alone (if the [New] Jersey legislature approves marriage, not civil unions) would add nearly $103 million per year in business to the state for at least the next few years.

But the economic impact could go way beyond that. Our research on what makes cities and regions grow shows that urban economic vitality today turns on openness to new ideas, new people and different lifestyles. Artistic, technological and cultural innovators and the more than 40 million workers who are part of what we call "the creative class" are drawn to places that are diverse and tolerant.

And when they settle somewhere, these people, who tend to have disposable income to spend in restaurants, bars and coffee shops, attract more of each other and fuel all kinds of economic activity.

Manhattan has long atracted gay men from all over the world. I myself left New Jersey for Manhattan in 1965, and stayed there for 35 years until the crammed-jammed, frazzled existence of that overcrowded and increasingly expensive island propelled me back to New Jersey, where I have SPACE and TREES and FLOWERS in a semi-suburban part of Newark a half hour car ride from the Village. Now, in addition to the push of overcrowding and high expenses of all kinds in Manhattan, New Jersey could also benefit from the pull of a society even more tolerant than New York, where they can actually marry and enjoy the economic security of being able to pool their resources to buy a house (and guys, remember that I will soon have my real-estate license, so I can help you find a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood in Newark) and enjoy legal protection of marital assets.
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"Marriage" is the key, NJ Legislators. Massachusetts had the guts to call their same-sex legal status "marriage". New Jersey must not be less courageous. There's money to be made in courage.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,885 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:40 PM

 
Diverting Attention. This year's hurricane season is just about over, and it proved astoundingly mild. Only five full hurricanes developed, and none hit any part of the United States — nor much of any other land mass. Nonetheless, the doomsayers in our midst who have been frantically trying to 'wake us' to the 'threat' of human-induced climate change insist that this stark departure from their predictions that "global warming" will make for ever worse hurricane seasons have not relented. They continue to assert, with absolute 'scientific' certitude, that we are inevitably going to suffer horrendously in future years. Indeed, the world is less than a decade from a "point of no return", intoned John McLaughlin on this past weekend's McLaughlin Group TV punditfest. What a bunch of bull. They shout, "Don't pay any attention to that man behind the curtain. Listen to me!"
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"Global" does not mean "here and there, now and then". As we all know from global-replaces in word processing, "global" means "everywhere" and "every time". If what so-called climatologists are actually talking about is something other than that, they need to choose another term.
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Remember "El Niño" and "La Niña"? Remember that first El and then La were the be-all and end-all of climate variation? Then "global warming" came into vogue, and El and La somehow vanished from public awareness. They're b-a-a-a-ck! But not The Next Big Thing and comprehensive explanation they were touted to be when they first rose to prominence. I have heard El spoken of once in the past few weeks, and La not at all. Yet.
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The neat thing about El and La was that they provided a kind of explanation for why some years are warmer and wetter or colder and dryer than others, and they alternated, so there appeared to be some balance in nature. Then along came "global warming" with its dire prediction that every year would be warmer and dryer. And when that didn't happen, and warmer meant wetter? Well, that is a temporary aberration, but just wait: the inevitable progression to universal desertification of internal land masses and flooding of hundreds of thousands of square miles of coastlines all around the planet will resume. And not, of course, because we just happen to be in an interglacial period (between Ice Ages), but because we are destroying the world! This year's hurricane season was nothing? An aberration, meaningless.
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How many "aberrations" do we have to see before we realize that the "pattern" is bullsh*t?
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Moslem Takeover of Europe — or Not. Another alarmist prediction we have seen is that Europe's declining population will inevitably result in a vast inflow of immigrants from neighboring areas, mostly Moslem, and Europe will be conquered by Islam by process of demographic change. A Reuters story today about the Anglican Church and diversity issues in Britain reported that there are only 1.8 million Moslems in Britain. There are over 6 million in the United States, which is thousands of miles from the Middle East and has a growing population.
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I like disaster scenarios as much as the next person, but it would be more entertaining if they bore some resemblance to reality.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,882 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:56 AM

 
Smash Homeowners Associations! The fascistic, tyrannical nature of "homeowners associations" has made the news again today. An AP story hilited on AOL reports:

A homeowners association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan.

Worse, the tyranny of this particular group resolved to the tyranny of one man:

The association in this 200-home subdivision 270 miles southwest of Denver has sent a letter to her saying that residents were offended by the sign and the board "will not allow signs, flags etc. that can be considered divisive."

The subdivision's rules say no signs, billboards or advertising are permitted without the consent of the architectural control committee.

[Homeowners association president] Kearns ordered the committee to require Jensen to remove the wreath, but members refused after concluding that it was merely a seasonal symbol that didn't say anything. Kearns fired all five committee members.

Two polls accompanying the story on AOL showed wide public distaste for such tyranny (results as of 1:15pm EST):

Who[m] do you side with in this dispute?
Woman with wreath 90%
Homeowners association 10%
Total Votes: 386,410

What's your general opinion of homeowners associations?
Negative 70%
Neutral 20%
Positive 11%
Total Votes: 370,557

Why do we tolerate private tyrants' exercising essentially governmental power over their fellow citizens? Homeowners associations are not branches of government and are not authorized in any sane legal system to exert governmental control over anyone. It is time to smash all homeowners associations and free this country from the tyranny of the smallest of small minds. Government, subject to Constitutional protections of basic rights, such as free political expression, must be the only entity that exerts governmental control. All homeowners associations should be abolished as a matter of public policy. If people want to show political signs on their own property, that is their right. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., "Let freedom ring from all the lawns of all the tract homes in all the subdivisions in all the suburbs of the Nation. Let freedom ring!"
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,880 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:37 PM

 
Celibacy, Shmelibacy. Pope Benedict XVI this week reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church's traditional stance on celibacy for priests — of the Western Rite. You see, priests of the Eastern Rite, Uniate churches, integral parts of the reunited Catholic Church, are allowed to marry. So much for celibacy being a doctrinal requirement of the faith.
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You see, once upon a time, a number of churches in various parts of the world broke away or wandered away from Rome. They then returned to the fold and accepted the authority of the Pope and the unity of the church, but retained separate forms of worship and standards for the priesthood. And they permitted priests to marry. The Pope accepts that married priests of the Eastern Churches in communion with Rome are validly ordained and can serve priestly functions. So why can't priests of the Latin Church marry?
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There is no basis in the teachings of Jesus for forbidding priests to marry — or no Christian church could allow priests to marry. The Latin Church's stance on this is costing it dearly. For one thing, the number of men willing to serve as priests and deprive themselves of sexual companionship for life has dwindled so low that the Church finds it hard to keep some of its churches open, and it cannot compete with Protestant churches in missionary activities in the Third World.
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For another, a lot of homosexual men who don't want to answer embarrassing questions about why they haven't married (a woman) flee to the camouflage of priestly celibacy. Some are deeply troubled about their orientation and try with all their will to suppress their sexual desires. But fail. Sometimes they get out of line with members of the parish, including altar boys, and get the Church in deep, expensive trouble.
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None of this need happen. The Church of Rome needs to grow up, renounce the antisexual nonsense of "Saint" "Paul" (Saul of Tarsus) who intruded alien ideas into the early church, and accept that when Jesus talked of love being a good thing, he included sexual love. Even, indeed, homosexual love.
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It is very hard for the Church to counsel married and dating couples from utter ignorance of what marriage, even dating, is all about. It is even harder for them to help with advice about raising children and settling family problems when they have absolutely no experience in those areas. The Church's insistence on celibacy is dysfunctional in the extreme and must end.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,876 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:15 PM

 
Leave Gay Men Alone. The world is always rife with lunatic notions. Among the most pernicious widely believed today is the idea that gay men are so free now that they don't need gay bars, but can dispense with places where they can be alone with each other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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"Birds of a feather flock together." The human race has known that for a very long time:

Individuals of like character, taste, or background (tend to stay together), as in The members of the club had no trouble selecting their yearly outing--they're all birds of a feather. The idea of like seeks like dates from ancient Greek times, and "Birds dwell with their kind" was quoted in the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus. The full saying in English, Birds of a feather flock together, was first recorded in 1545. [Emphasis in original]

Why, then, do we have such trouble with this concept in the United States today?
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Endlessly we are lectured — indeed, practically pummelled — into accepting that we "should" ignore all differences among people and be friends with and spend essentially all our time with people with whom we share NOTHING. The ordinary course of human relationships rejects all such advice and compulsion. Decade after decade, century after century, people cling to their own kind. It's not rejection of others but simply affection for one's own.
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It's not evil. It's not conspiratorial. It's just simple human nature. Why can't we ALL accept that, and let people be with whom they want to be without making it into a humungous moral issue?
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Gay men are a pervasively (indeed astoundingly) oppressed minority, told by religion, (every) national culture, literature, television, and every other aspect of life in society that they are at the very least statistically abnormal and, at worst, "sick", immoral, and destined to go to Hell. It is not possible for gay men to immerse themselves in the dominant culture, which despises homosexuality, but still be well adjusted to their inner voice and personal needs. So, gay men must escape society's demands, to find a place where they can be alone, to themselves, and listen to themselves and each other, without all the dissonance of external voices and requirements.
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But straight people today won't let gay men be alone. Instead, straights insist that circumstances have so changed, and gay men are now so free, that they need no longer segregate themselves into a "gay ghetto", but can integrate fully into the straight world yet still be themselves. That fatuous assumption is born of ignorance (not to say "stupidity").
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Would straight people, were they an oppressed minority, gladly integrate themselves into a dominantly homosexual culture, or would they feel themselves perpetually and irreconcilably different and thus incapable of accepting second-class membership in (gay) society?
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If every television commercial that strove for "sex appeal" showed two men ogling, flirting, caressing, kissing each other, would straights be comfortable with that, translating it into their own terms to mean that whoever you are attracted to, this product will help you win him or her over? Or would they find themselves excluded and oppressed, utterly and absolutely incapable of seeing themselves in a gay couple?
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This is what naive straight people would have gay men do: see their own lives in straight relationships. Impossible! And everyone of any sense KNOWS it's impossible.
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Straights have no conception of how thoroughly, and, for us, oppressively, (heterosexual) society is permeated by heterosexuality. They don't see the kisses between men and women as anything but ordinary. They have never for an instant considered how they would like it if every time people kissed on television and film, it was two men kissing. Every single time, year after year, decade after decade. Would they get used to it and even smile upon it? Or would they find it distasteful every single time, not just because it's not something they want to do but because they hunger for images of men kissing women — which is NEVER shown?
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Would straight men regard still fotos and film or video footage of men kissing men as an acceptable alternative image to men kissing women? Would they feel all warm and fuzzy, and think, "Ah! Isn't that beautiful!" when they see men kissing men? Or would they be alienated and hostile, and turn away so they don't have to see it?
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Would heterosexuals gladly accept being surrounded and outnumbered by men kissing and leering at each other? Groping each other in public?
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Gay men are supposed to accept straight people carrying on in public. Even other straight people sometimes have to tell idiots, "Get a room!" What if everywhere around these straight individuals, men were grabbing at men, hugging and caressing men, kissing men? Would the straights compelled to witness this be blase about it? Or would they be endlessly offended, even disgusted, and possibly alarmed about losing their own sexual identity to an alien imposition?
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If straight people had to create special little places for themselves, "straight bars", and gather together in private, to be themselves, would they welcome gay men barging in and staring at them as tho they were zoo animals, and watch them as tho observing primitive mating rituals? Or would they deeply resent the intrusion and want to be left alone, to be themselves?
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Perhaps this gives you the tiniest bit of understanding of what it is to be homosexual in a dominantly heterosexual society. We need to left alone.
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We don't want 'understanding' or 'sympathetic' straight people in our places. We want to be alone with each other.
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We don't want lesbians (if there are such creatures, and gay men really, really doubt it) staring at us when we are trying to get sexual with each other.
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We don't want straight people, of either gender, or lesbian women, speculating about our sex lives and who is going to be "the woman"/femme or "the man"/butch if we manage somehow to get together despite being spied upon by The Enemy. Straights simply don't understand that no well-adjusted gay man is "femme" or a "woman", but is always and ever a man — that we never feel so masculine as when we are alone in sexual activity with another man. They just don't "get it". And it's foolish of us to think they do.
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Gay men go to gay bars or other gay places to meet, and possibly hook up with, other gay men. If we wanted to be with women or straight people in general, we would go to straight places. The simple fact that we go to a gay place means we want to be LEFT ALONE. Is that really such a difficult concept for straight people to understand? Well, it might be if all straight people were idiots. ARE all straight people idiots?
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If you are straight, do not EVER go to any gay place. Ever. Do not invade our space.
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If you are gay, and want to spend time with your straight/female friends, do so in a straight place. That's where it is appropriate for men and women to hang out together. Do NOT take women to a gay men's place. You may feel more comfortable there, but neither the woman you intrude there (who will be surrounded by men who want no part of a woman) nor the gay men who wanted to be alone with other men there, will be comfortable. Be considerate. Be intelligent. Be aware. Be sensitive. Don't take women to gay men's places. Ever.
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And certainly do not deride or criticize any gay man who objects to your invading and thus destroying a gay place by intruding women where they just plain do not belong. I repeat: The very least that "gay" means is "homosexual", and the very least that "homosexual" means is "same sex", that is, one sex, not two. Gay is like pregnant in that regard. There is no more such a thing as "slitely straight" than there is such a thing as "slitely pregnant". A place either is or is not homosexual: one sex.
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One sex = homosexual/gay. Two sexes = heterosexual/NOT gay. It really is that simple, and only a simpleton could fail to appreciate that.
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The disgusting reality is that everyone knows all this, instinctually, but a very large proportion of gay men still, to this day, 37 years after Stonewall, hate themselves and each other, so will do everything in their power to try, against insuperable odds, to resist their irresistible attraction to men, and place female bodyguards between themselves and the men they want but fear. They will loudly proclaim an "antidiscriminatory" intent, and their supposed belief that 'everybody should accept everybody'. But that's not what they really feel. What they do really feel is that men and women belong together; men and men do NOT belong together; and somebody must save them from their own perverted desires, even if it is "their [own] better selves".
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They make it impossible for themselves to cruise men, and thus avoid going off with men and 'sullying themselves' in 'immorality'. Alas, they then proceed to impose their own dysfunction upon others, and do everything in their power to keep ALL gay men from meeting each other and getting together. Why do we permit this?
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Alas, the laws are written by straight people, and they are so consumed by feminist-induced guilt about what they as straight men have been doing 'to' women that they displace onto gay men their own guilts. We are to pay for STRAIGHT men's lack of attention to and support of their wives or girlfriends. WE are to pay for straight men's refusal to clear the table or wash dishes, vacuum the rugs or change the baby.
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Leave us out of it! We have nothing to do with your debts relative to women. We're not married to women, and would not ever be married to a woman, under any circumstances, even if a gun were put to our head. Make your own amends for your own sins. Leave us out of it.
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If truth be told — tho the whole truth is rarely told in this country, in this age — gay men don't believe in lesbianism. Oh, we've been told it's real, that there are lots of women who crave sex with women. We just don't believe it. Our base question is "What can they do? Bump pussies?" We just don't believe it.
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We know that homosexuality (men-with-men) is real — very, very real. We know we get, hm, how can we say this in mixed company? "physically aroused" on SEEING a man we find attractive. We are irresistibly, powerfully, massively impelled to sex with men. And we love it.
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We do not for an instant believe that "lesbians" have any such powerful sexual feeling for women. There are no sex places for lesbians, no baths, no trucks, no parks, no rest stops on the interstate. Sex between women is a fraud, an urban legend. If it ever happens at all, it is an aberration, a rarity, a companion to an emotional relationship in women whose sex lives are empty.
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In gay men, by contrast, sex is primary, the top of everything. We want it, we look for it, we hunt for it, we get it. And if we don't get it, we are actively miserable. We can't go weeks or months without it just because we aren't "in love". Sex in itself is enuf. We love it, we want it, we've got to have it, because sex between men is so wonderful as to be inexpressible. Words fail us. THAT is homosexuality.
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We don't go to gay bars to chat. We go to look for somebody hot.
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It is as inhibiting to us to have a woman — any woman, "lesbian" (ha!) or straight — watching us as it would be for straights to try to hook up for casual sex in front of Father Murphy or Sister Mary Katherine. Even if Father Murphy or Sister Mary Katherine wouldn't actually step physically between us and our intended sexual conquest to stop us from going home with each other, their mere presence, intently watching what we do, would be powerful interference with our sex lives. Is that so hard to understand?
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The moral of this story is, (1) if you are straight, do not EVER go to a gay bar — ever; and (2) if you are gay, do not EVER bring women ("lesbian" or straight doesn't matter) or straight men into a gay bar or any other gay situation. There are many other hours of your day or life, when it is (reasonably) appropriate to mix genders and orientations. A gay bar is not the place; when gay men want to be with other gay men is not the time.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,873 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:33 PM

 
Now the Democrats Talk about Debt! Regular readers of this blog will know that I have repeatedly — starting, at latest, with my entry to this blog of April 13, 2005 — tried to get the Democratic Party to become the champion of the debt-ridden poor and middle class, to absolutely no avail. The words "debt", "usury", and "bankruptcy" did not appear on the national Democratic campaign website nor in any of the literature I received in a hotly contested campaign here in New Jersey for U.S. Senate.
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This past week (November 21st to be precise), I received an email from Democrats.com ("The Aggressive Progressives") that finally addressed the issue of "debt slavery" and linked to a website of the Consumers Union Action Fund, Inc. that contains an email piece one can send to legislators via that site. This email alert arrived two full weeks after the election!
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Why now rather than then?
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If Democrats had raised this issue and hammered away at it before the election, they could have won a "bulletproof majority" in both House and Senate that would have empowered them to pass debt-relief legislation that the President could not defeat, because Democrats would have been able to override a veto. But now? What conceivable good can such an email campaign do?
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The present, Radical Right, Republican President will have to sign off on any measure Democrats pass to give Americans debt relief, and he won't do it. So, no meaningful measure can pass, and Americans will continue to be oppressed by debt, because the Democrats refused to raise the issue when voters could actually do something about it. Now, all voters can do is make noise, not change.
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Is it all just political theater, fiction, lies? — shadow-boxing, in which an ostensible two parties are really one, controlled by the same people and forces? Are they throwing imitation punches at a make-believe, illusory opponent? putting on a show for the voters but really colluding between themselves to protect the status quo? You have to wonder.
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By the way, in looking to see when I first addressed "debt slavery", I read lower into that online archive (April 2005, which you can find in a list to the right of this main column) and found this paragraph in the entry for April 9, 2005:

It has always irritated liberals that conservatives and libertarians get to call themselves the "Right", which subliminally suggests that anyone else is "Wrong", because that's all that's "Left". Maybe we should start calling ourselves the "Good", for wanting the best for everyone, and let the selfish continue to call themselves the "Right". Among which would you rather be numbered? The Right, or The Good?

That is a really Good idea. Let's press "the Left" to present itself as "the Good".
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I was also reminded, on looking back at what I wrote a year and a half ago, that it is for me a genuine pleasure to reread my stuff. It is so hard to find things I agree with wholeheartedly, that when I see something I can agree with entirely, I am both relieved and delited. There IS a voice of sanity in the world. Alas, it's just my own, a lone and solitary voice in the wilderness of a political theater of the absurd.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,872 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Much Ado about "Nigger". Michael Richards, who played "Kramer" on the TV sitcom Seinfeld, got himself into a great big helping of hurt when he exploded in rage at black hecklers and repeatedly shouted "the N-word" at them. Indignant "African Americans" — or is that supposed to be hyphenated: "African-Americans"? — or "blacks" or "Afro-Americans" or "Negroes" or "Colored People" or "nigras" or "niggas" or "darkies" or what-have-you — exploded in indignation! A crime against humanity! Grow the f*k up.
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I live in a predominantly black neighborhood within a majority-black American city that has a brite young black mayor, a former Rhodes scholar. Anyone who is around blacks of other than the highest socioeconomic classes is going to hear the word "nigger" — if pronounced "nigga" — ENDLESSLY. It is in hiphop music. It is on the bus. It is dropped casually on the street, without regard to who might be around. What is the big deal?
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Oh, Michael Richards is white! My my my my my! How awful. A 'honky' dared to say "the N-word". Oh, shut the f*k up!
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Straight people are now using the word "queer" as tho it is perfectly unexceptionable, completely acceptable to all gay men, even tho 3/4 of us find it EXTREMELY offensive. We essentially NEVER use it for ourselves, among ourselves. Oh, maybe, on isolated occasions, we will ask close friends, of someone, "Is he queer?" But that's rare. The word "queer" pretty much NEVER comes into the conversation among gay men, and had NEVER been used for lesbian women at all, ever, until lesbians decided to hide themselves in the great gay mass of homosexual men, and maladjusted faggots (a word we DO use for self-despising, antihomosexual losers who wish they weren't gay) permitted that. Many gay men have never outgrown their childhood feeling that they are absolutely alone, unique in the world, the only person in history who has ever wanted his own gender. Even decades after they should fully have appreciated that there are tens of millions of us in the U.S. alone, and hundreds of millions on planet Earth, they continue to cast about desperately and indiscriminately to find allies so they don't feel so alone in "the struggle". They especially seek out female allies, to camouflage their homoSEXual nature and MIS(S)represent their sexuality as, for all practical purposes, male lesbianism, and thus unobjectionable nothingness — since lesbianism is more urban myth than pounding sexual imperative, and straight society doesn't feel threatened by lesbianism. Some straight men supposedly find lesbianism sexually exciting, even tho of course genuine lesbianism would exclude them completely.
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Some stupid, extremely young homos have given implied permission to uninformed straight people to call gay men "queer". But no one has given white (or Oriental or Amerindian) people permission to call black people "nigger".
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And that's the only difference.
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The ordinarily excellent TV sitcom Girlfriends — what the heck happened to Toni?; did the actress want out, so the show wrote her out by sending her off to New York, a continent away from her Girlfriends in L.A.? — had an episode in which one of those extremely rare weird white people who plays at being black was singing along with a song that was playing on the radio, when the word "nigga" came on and she had the unmitigated gall to sing along! The nerve of the stupid white bitch! How dare you sing along with the words of a song that everyone around you is permitted to speak? What kind of psychotic racist are you?
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Answer: not psychotic, not racist. "Nigga", "nigger", "darky", "nigrah", and every other variation on that theme are just words. They mean nothing but what people bring to them. "Blacks" — who have been, at various times in the recent past, subjected to enormous pressure to call themselves "African(-)American" and demand that everyone else do the same — have changed what they tell others they want to be called, several times. They moved from "nigger" (Southern white usage) to "Negro" (capital-N, dignified racial classification), to "Afro-American", to "black", to "person of color" to "African(-)American". What next? "African", without the "American"? "Third World"? "Earth-toned"? What? How are white people to keep up? How, indeed, are 'black' people to keep up?
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The problem is not the words. The problem is the attitudes. White people don't care what anyone calls them, because they're proud to be white. Call us "honky"? That's fine with us. Call us ANYTHING, and we'll be content, because we are content to be who and what we are. "Pinky"? Fine. We're pink, many of us. "Paleface"? "Whitey"? "Washed-out"? Call us anything you like. We are glad to be white, and anything that reflects our whiteness reflects proudly on us, because we are PROUD to be white.
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If blacks were proud to be black, they would REVEL in every single term that emphasizes their blackness. They would GLORY in every inventive adjective that tells the world they are black.
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Their problem has been that they are running not from a word but from their race.
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"Honky bastard"? The "honky" part doesn't bother us at all. The "bastard" part might or might not. "Nigger bastard!", however, seems to evoke rather stronger feelings.
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The problem with any euphemism is that it is a stand-in for the correct description, and it is accurate description that is the problem for people who wish to evade being identified as part of a group they despise, or feel others might despise.
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"Sticks and stones / May break my bones / But names will never hurt me." But somehow "nigger", and "queer" still do hurt.
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Thus the indignation articulated live on CNN Headline News yesterday afternoon by black Americans at Michael Richards' rant.
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Last nite, Richards apologized abjectly on Letterman. I saw the interview from beginning to end. He had lost control, flown into a rage, and said things about one person that the whole black community then gleefully projected onto themselves, so many black people in this country being gluttons for punishment who eagerly scoop up insults to add to their collection. Richards didn't say, "I wasn't talking to you or about you", but let all black people (by whatever name they like today) feel he WAS talking about each and every one of them rather than about some rude hecklers and audience members talking loudly among themselves and interfering with his act.
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Listen, babies — and I do mean "babies": words are words, not rocks nor punches nor bullets nor nooses. Just words. You want to call me a "faggot"? That reflects badly on you, not me. I am GLAD to be gay. I wouldn't be straight for all the tea in China (that's a dated idiom, I admit; my parents used it for this and that). There is no amount of money that would make me even TRY to "convert". I love being gay. Love it. I'm proud of it. Were there a "straight pill", I would not take it. Never in a million years would I want to be heterosexual. I would literally rather die.
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So altho it irritates the hell out of me when maladjusted fruits tell people it's okay to call gay men "queer", at end I don't much care. Call me "queer", "fag", "fruit", or anything else specific to homosexual MEN. That's fine. But don't insult my manhood. I am a homosexual MAN.
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If I were black and somebody called me "nigger", I might be a tad irritated, but I'd have heard the word, pronounced "nigga", at least 30,000 times, by my own people. You'd think such endless repetition would have desensitized people to this silly six-letter word.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,867 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:02 AM

 
Filling the Hole. Work has finally begun on the building that is to replace the World Trade Center as New York City's tallest — and the world's tallest, at least as now envisioned, and at least for a while.

Seventy trucks rolled into ground zero Saturday to pour the concrete base of the signature skyscraper at the new World Trade Center, creating the first visible signs of the long-delayed tower.

It's about time.
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I have mentioned here that I sometimes take the PATH interstate subway from the WTC station, so see the Ground Zero worksite up close (albeit at nite). Last August 27th, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin rightly countered implied criticism, by a CBS News 60 Minutes interviewer, of the slow pace of reconstruction of his widely devastated city in these words: "You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair." Tho he was criticized for what some perceived as a callous remark, he was absolutely right.
+
On September 26th I expressed my hope that New York would stop delaying and reject downsizing, but build, at Ground Zero:

the tallest building on Earth, proof that we are not cowards afraid to build high and proud into the sky.
+
And when we build it, let us not give it some stupid name like "Freedom Tower", dishonestly to pretend that it is our freedom, rather than our Zionism, that was attacked on 9/11. Let it indeed bear no name that harkens back to 9/11.
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"World Trade Center" was a good name in its time. It both looked outward and claimed for New York a central position in world commerce. I'm sure we can come up with an equally good name for a new tower, as proud and self-referential as "Empire State Building". Something that dedicates us to world diversity, tolerance, justice, and progress.
+
Islamist fanaticism seeks to impose narrow-minded conformity and return us to the Middle Ages. We could not do better in renouncing that program than to dedicate the world's tallest building to the future.

Present plans, alas, are to call the new building "Freedom Tower". I reject such a ridiculous name. Freedom is not a bad thing to which to dedicate a building, or society, but the motive behind naming the replacement for the WTC "Freedom Tower" is to falsify the motive of the 9/11 hijackers and as well falsify what our foreign policy has been dedicated to for 40 years: the slaughter of Moslems to make the Middle East safe for Jews. If they want to name the new building for what the attacks were really all about, let them call it "One Zionist Center" or "Israel Forever Tower". If, however, they want it to speak to our historic aspirations, let them call it something like "Futurespire" or "Justice Tower".
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,867 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:16 PM

 
Bush: Traitor and Idiot. 'President' Bush has disgraced the Nation yet again, twice in two days.
+
First, he compared the need for patience in Iraq in the quest for "freedom" to the success(!) of our relationship with Vietnam! Un-free, COMMUNIST Vietnam! — this on a day when a story emerged at home about Lyndon Johnson's indignation with the pro-Communist behavior of The New York Times and other treasonous Leftwingers in the Sixties. I lived thru those bad old days of active treason by the Left. It was a terrible time for anti-Communist Liberals like me, and I forgive none of the treason, none of the Communist takeovers, none of the mass murders that American Leftists and isolationists unleashed upon Southeast Asia. No one should ever forgive such crimes, not from the Left, not from the Right; not in Southeast Asia, not in Southwest Asia.
+
Consider these quotes from the Cox News Service story on Dumbya's first day in COMMUNIST Vietnam.

The Vietnam War's lesson for the Iraq conflict is that freedom takes time to trump hatred, Bush said. "We'll succeed," he said of the war in Iraq, "unless we quit."

But we did quit in Vietnam, and the people of that entire region have suffered the consequences for 31 years, and counting. Vietnam is not a triumph of freedom but of the enemies of freedom! — you moron!

With critics of his Iraq policy drawing comparisons to the Vietnam War, Bush used the now-robust diplomatic and trade relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam to sound a note of hope for future stability in the Middle East.

"It's just going to take a long period of time for the ideology that is hopeful, and that is an ideology of freedom, to overcome an ideology of hate," he said after meeting for lunch with Australian Prime Minister John Howard. * * *

Bush has come to tout the success [in doing what?] of free market policies, but he arrived empty-handed in Hanoi. On Monday, the House defeated a bill the White House wanted to extend normal trading relations with Vietnam.

Good for Congress! Vietnam is still our enemy. It is still Communist. It is thus still an enemy of freedom, not part of what Dubya still sometimes calls the "free world".

"We are indeed very happy to see the expansion of relations between our two countries," Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet said at a state dinner for Bush. * * *

Bush told Vietnamese leaders he was impressed by the country's economic reforms but "stressed the importance of working on the human rights front," White House spokesman Tony Snow said.

What a bunch of scumbags the Bush Administration is. This Bush creature evaded service in the Vietnam War and now, like that other draft dodger, Bill Clinton, dares to honor a Communist regime that is the enemy of everything this country stands for, and even praise it for its freedom and economic reform. Oh, yeah. As long as people have economic reforms, they don't need our kind of freedom. Vietnamese 'freedom' is good enuf for Vietnamese. That's not why we went to war in Southeast Asia, and when we just walked away, we weren't the ones to suffer mass executions and decades of oppression. Our losses were monetary — I wonder if any part of our national debt still harkens back to that war; hm — and done with. You can see the human tally inscribed in a black stone chevron in Washington, D.C. I suspect Bush has never been to that memorial. Nor Clinton. In one sense, they should go. In another, they would dishonor it by their presence.
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Now, trade with Vietnam is helping to destroy American jobs, so of course the President of Vietnam is happy about the growing trade relationship. It hurts us! Communists who still control that country can get back at us in some measure, and cause us harm, which they are very eager to do. They'll get a lot of help from Bush's bunch of New World Order traitors. Free trade with Communist countries is treason, pure and simple, as much treason as selling out Americans for Israel by making a billion people furious with us.
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That was yesterday. Today the moron spoke repeatedly about "nucular" this and "nucular" that. He has to have been told hundreds of times that he has got to stop saying "nucular". But he insists on saying it anyway, impressing the entire world with his stupidity and, thus, presumably also the stupidity of the American people. As Jack and Jackie Kennedy wowed the world with their elegance and intelligence, Dubya appalls the world with his stupidity.
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Maybe he can redeem himself slitely by throwing up on the Prime Minister of Vietnam.*
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I am so disgusted with this Radical Right moron and the treasonous Republican regime for which he is the puppet figurehead. Maybe things will start to change in some meaningful way on January 3rd. But will it be change for the better? We can only hope. One thing is fairly certain: things are most unlikely to be worse.
____________________

* Dubya's father also once disgraced us during a foreign trip, by throwing up on the Prime Minister of Japan. You just can't let Bushes out of the country — unless it is to send them to an international war-crimes tribunal. Then it doesn't matter what stupid thing they say or whom they throw up on.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,865 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:47 PM

 
Bizarre Presidential Talk. A few days ago a friend sent me an article from one of the New York daily newspapers (News?) titled "Hil vs. Giuliani: The race we've dreamed of", that speculates that the 2008 Presidential contest could be between two New Yorkers, Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. I told my friend:

RIDICULOUS. It is so much feminist claptrap that Hillary Clinton will be the candidate of the Democratic Party. She is DESPISED in much of the country. The only people who would vote for her are (a) Radical-Feminist lesbians and (b) people who really want her husband back in office and think that if Hillary is elected, Bill will be the real power, behind the throne. Those two constituencies amount to nothing. As for Rudy Giuliani, if people think the Protestant evangelicals who control the Republican Party are going to vote for a pro-abortion Italian CATHOLIC from NEW YORK CITY, they are halluskinatin'.

On November 13th, The New York Times published an article entitled "For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy’, which contained this observation:

white evangelicals make up about a quarter of the electorate. Whatever strains may be creeping into the Israeli-American alliance over Iraq, the Palestinians and Iran, a large part of the Republican Party’s base remains committed to a fiercely pro-Israel agenda that seems likely to have an effect on policy choices.

Aside from the lunacy of Christian Zionism — if the Jews are God's chosen people, then Christians are NOT; if God still has a special covenant with the Jews, then He does NOT have a special relationship to Christians; if Judaism is the faithful perpetuation of that Covenant, then Christianity is heresy, and the Jews properly not just reject Jesus but arguably killed him with justice; so no real Christian can be a Zionist on theological grounds without disowning Christianity, which not merely ignores Judaism but indeed overthrows it — the point to note here is that Evangelicals comprise a quarter of the electorate, about half of a winning vote for President. 70% of Evangelicals voted Republican this month. The Republicans still lost. They cannot afford to alienate Evangelicals by offering a pro-abortion Catholic. And Rudolph Giuliani is even worse for Evangelicals, because he brazenly conducted an adulterous affair with a woman he brought into Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the Mayor of New York — in front of his children! The suggestion that Rudy Giuliani will be the Republicans' choice is madness.
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Hillary is a harpie, as much of the Nation sees her. Nobody believes her recent conversion to a nuanced view of abortion, to make it available but rare. That's bull and everybody knows she is all for abortion on demand.
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Moreover, this country is not Radical Feminist. Remember the so-called "Equal Rights Amendment"? It went down in flames and there has been no attempt to resurrect it. Many people say they have no problem voting for a woman for President, but people lie to pollsters. When asked if they think their friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc., would have a problem, a large proportion of voters say yes, those OTHER people would have trouble with that. This projection onto others of hostility to a woman President is regarded by pollsters as an indicator of what people really think themselves but are unwilling to be held to account for.
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If ever there will be a woman President in the United States — and despite the rhetoric that it's "inevitable", remember that we have had only one Catholic President in the entire history of this country — it will have to be a woman people like. Hillary ain't it.
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As for the other prominent person who announced his intention to explore a run for President this week, John McCain, nobody in his right mind could vote for McCain because altho he may be likable, he is absolutely, friggin' demented. His politics are all over the map and you can NEVER know how he'll react to any given piece of news. On Wednesday, October 18th:

[McCain] joked Wednesday he would "commit suicide" if Democrats win the Senate in November.

This is a man who is supposed to appeal to Democrats? Many Democrats feel that McCain is so sympathetic to many of their views that he should leave the Republican Party for the Democratic Party, but he jokes that he'd rather commit suicide than see the Dems win the Senate?
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Where are the sane and sensible candidates from the major parties?
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If you want an odd candidate, I'm available. I could attract the gay, bald, disabled, and elderly vote, since I'm all of those things. A couple of weeks of grammatical and vocabulary drill, and I'll be fluent in Spanish, French, and Portuguese. I'm an ardent believer in the magic of our Constitution and the limited government it set forth, but also a true believer that the rich can take care of themselves, and the function of government is to help those who can't take care of themselves. Vote for me, and I'll set you free!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,865 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:01 PM

 
Falsifying the Results. Conservatives are making lots of strange, silly noises about how the election that overthrew the Republican Party in Congress wasn't a repudiation of conservatism and the policies of the Bush Administration at all. Rather, the voters were showing their genuine conservatism by reproaching an Administration that had lost its way and abandoned its own policies. Democrats have swung far to the Right, away from the Left, and it was their conservative switch that enabled people to vote Democratic. Sure, sure. Whatever you say.
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So conservatives should be ecstatic with the result, right? They have triumphed, the Left has been defeated. Nancy Pelosi is Ronette Reagan and Barrie Goldwater all rolled up in one.
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These same commentators pretend that Bush abandoned Reaganite fiscal conservatism, so was punished for embracing pork-barrel politics. This entirely falsifies the Reagan Revolution, which tripled the national debt during Reagan's two terms and added a third to that enlarged debt under his vice president, the elder George Bush, when he continued the Reagan Revolution in his own (one) term. So the Reagan Revolution was the exact opposite of fiscally conservative. It quadrupled the national debt in 12 years!
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The New York Post pretends that the Nation's economy stands to lose big due to Democratic takeover, because Democrats will at once let the tax cuts that Bush Republicans instituted end, restoring the tax rates under Clinton, and retain what the Post dishonestly calls "the widely despised death tax". But under Clinton, we had so much economic growth that we achieved the greatest budgetary surplus in the history of the world! Wouldn't that be fiscally conservative? And the "estate tax" — not "death tax" — is widely adored by people who understand that it affects only the very rich, has never been aimed at the poor or middle class, and reduces the need for money to be taken from the poor and middle class by bringing in more money from the rich. At end, then, truly progressive taxation is fiscally conservative, because it puts the Nation in the black, not red, and puts more money in the pockets of people who actually spend it, not tuck it away in bank accounts — some offshore.
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One thing that has changed, however, is the Red-Blue dichotomy. Bob Beckel, a self-described Liberal, suggested late on the nite of the election, that the whole Red-Blue thing was never accurate and is now meaningless. I disagree that it was never meaningful, but agree that the color-coded map has changed dramatically, especially if you look at governorships and the U.S. Senate map. Part of what has happened is a realization by conservative voters that the Republican version of conservatism did not match their own. But part is also a reflection of the dispersion of population from Liberal areas to historically conservative areas in search of winter warmth.
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Arizona surprised much of the Nation in rejecting an attempt to restrict marriage to a man and a woman, the only state's voters to do so. Why Arizona? Because Arizona has attracted retirees from more liberal parts of the Nation. So has the South, but the South is hugely populated, whereas Arizona was litely populated before the silver set chose to spend their golden years in the sun.
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While older people tend to be more conservative than they were in their youth, Northeastern and Midwestern Liberals who become a bit more conservative in their old age are still more Liberal than people taught to be conservative from birth. Arizona also, like much of the Southwest, now has a significant and growing population of immigrants who have become citizens, and their more Liberal stands on some issues will be making increasing impact on the politics of the entire Southwest, including even Texas, in time.
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Alas, many Mexican immigrants are socially far more conservative than Northern retirees, but it's easy to allow your values to evolve when you are physically and financially comfortable, and freed from the social immobility of hidebound Mexico. Allowed by society and by financial circumstance to think new thoughts, many Latinos question the restrictive traditions imposed upon them in their youth, so may go thru the reverse of the process Northern Liberals experience and become more Liberal as they get older, not less. As they begin to feel that they can be what they want to be rather than what they were told to be, they begin to accept that other people have the right to be what they want to be too.
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The vote against gay marriage even where it passed was apparently less overwhelming than earlier votes in other states. The country has started to relax about this issue. Civilization as we know it did not collapse when Massachusetts legalized gay marriage; it didn't end when Arizona rejected a ban on gay marriage. Ten years from now, we can expect same-sex "marriage", "civil union", or other such arrangements to be legal in a host of states. And civilization will still not have collapsed into chaos.
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Charles Thorpe, one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front at San Francisco State in 1970, wrote something that has remained with me in all the years since (approximate quote): "You know what you get when you mix red, white, and blue? Lavender." Fortunately, we are sufficiently advanced now that the homosexual-rights movement doesn't have to emasculate itself with soft images (pink, lavender) but can be as hard-edged, red-white-and-blue as everybody else. But his observation still holds.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,853 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:49 PM

 
7% Solution? Media have been extravagant in their evaluation of what happened last Tuesday, with words like "tsunami" swirling about in the mediasphere. The reality is much more modest. (Very long post. I enjoyed reading it, and it flew by for me much faster than its 3,300-some word tally might suggest. If you are busy, I'll understand if you skip this entirely or come back when you have more time. It's really good, tho.)
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As Pat Buchanan (the only Presidential candidate who ever heard of me; he interviewed me by phone many years ago for a column he was writing about annexing Canada) observed on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" on election nite, the total switch in votes in Congress will be on the order of 7%, hardly a "tsunami".
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The election last Tuesday established the proportion of Democrats vs. Republicans ("versus" being a totally apt word, alas, for this ratio) for the 110th Congress.
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The number that attaches to a Congress is determined by the sequential number of the biennial election for the House of Representatives. This will be the 110th Congress. 2 x 110 = 220 years, from 2007 (when the new Congress first meets) = 1787, the year the present U.S. Constitution came into force.
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Altho only 1/3 of the Senate can change in any two-year cycle, in that each Senator serves a six-year term, the entire House could change every two years. What a great idea!
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The House of Representatives in the (outgoing) 109th Congress had 233 Republicans, 201 Democrats and 1 Independent. The incoming House will have 234 Democrats and 201 Republicans.
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There is a total of 435 seats in the House (a number that has held since 1912, even tho the population of the Nation has more than tripled in that time). The old House was thus 54% Republican and 46% Democratic. The new House will be 46% Republican and 54% Democratic. That is a shift of 8%.
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The Senate in the 109th Congress was 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and one Independent who caucused with the Democrats. The new Senate will be 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats, and 2 Independents, both of whom "plan" to vote with the Democrats. The Republicans lost 6 seats, but the Democrats technically picked up only 5, giving each of the Republican and Democratic Parties 49 votes. The other two seats were won by the former Democrat Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who was defeated by Democratic voters in the primary but elected (stupidly) by the electorate overall in the general election, and a Socialist in Vermont, who replaced another Independent from Vermont. Technically speaking, then, there has been a shift from Republicans to Democrats of 5 seats. Independent James Jeffords of Vermont, who left the Republican Party a few years ago, was replaced by Socialist Bernie Sanders. Both Sanders and Jeffords generally aligned with the Democrats.
+
In that Sanders is Jewish, the number of Jews in the Senate may rise (I have not checked whether any of the present Jews in the Senate was defeated) from 12 to 13. Given that there are at present exactly 100 members of the Senate, the number of Jewish members equals their proportion of the world's greatest, and most powerful, deliberative body: 13%. Almost no one in the United States appreciates how TINY a minority Jews comprise of our total population: 2%. We have been propagandized into regarding Judaism as one of the "three major religions" of the United States, along with Protestantism and Catholicism.
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Even putting to one side the fact that Protestantism and Catholicism are only variations on a theme, Christianity, there is no way that Judaism, which appeals to only 6 million Americans, 2 percent of the general population of the Nation, should be viewed as one of this country's 'great religions'. It is not. 13% of the Senate equals 650% their proportion of the population. So despite the change in party affiliation, the new Congress is likely to continue to side mindlessly with Israel, no matter how horrifying its crimes and no matter how many hundreds of millions of people U.S. Government complicity in the crimes of Israel enrages. In regard to foreign policy, then, this election's effect is most unclear. Sadly, it is probable that Congress will continue to side with Israel in every single act of excess and mass murder it commits, which will continue to enrage the Arab and larger Moslem world even if we pull out of Iraq, and continue to mark for death every single American, under the theory that in a democracy, the people are responsible for the acts of their government. Our Government is Radical Zionist, and backs every murder committed by Israel in our name? Then we, each and every single one of us, will be held to account for our complicity in those crimes. Should we be? Not if we have spoken out and demanded our Government end its backing of Israel.
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If you (Americans), personally, have done nothing to influence the Government to stop making war on Arabs, then yes, each of you can legitimately be held to account for the crimes on behalf of Israel committed in your name. To exempt yourself from righteous reprisal, you need actively to object to U.S. complicity in the crimes of Israel. You can do so by writing email to the President (comments@whitehouse.gov) , Vice President (vice_president@whitehouse.gov) — who is in truth more like the real President, Dubya being only a puppet who mouths the words his betters write for him, — and/or your Senator and Representative. If you object to our Government's Radical Zionist policies but do not actively disown such behavior and try to change it, you consent to the continuation of policies that misrepresent your will, and our national will, and, thus, you do come to share guilt for the crimes committed in our name.
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If U.S. withdrawal from Iraq produces full-scale civil war, with vast death and the dismemberment of that country, we, the ordinary, decent people of the United States, will be hated with all the more passion because of the actions of our "representatives" — even tho they aren't the slitest representative of us, really — for having destroyed a country that was doing fine until we pushed our nose in where it just plain did not belong.
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I have always been very proud of having spoken — nay, shouted, in print terms — against U.S. assault upon Iraq. Months before the Bush Administration launched its utterly unwarranted attack upon Iraq — with support from many (stupid) Democrats — I attempted to dissuade Americans from committing that massive crime against humanity. No one listened. That, however, is not my fault. What would have been my fault is my saying nothing. I said plenty, 31,000 words of objection.
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In any case, a shift from Republican to Democratic of 6% in the Senate and 8% in the House amounts to a grand total of less than a 7% shift in party affiliation in Congress overall. Big f*king deal (remember that the wildcard * can stand for any number of characters).
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How much can change with a 7% shift in Congress? Can so slim a majority pass a legislative program? Sure, if they all hold together, but that's most unlikely, in our system. We don't have "party discipline" in the United States, and every member of each house is entitled to vote his or her conscience on every single measure considered. Parties, even state delegations within a single party, fracture over issues all the time.
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But even if the Democrats could "get their act together" to pass legislation, there is nothing to keep Dubya from vetoing any and every measure a Democratic Congress passes. What then?
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The electorate did NOT give the Democrats a "bulletproof majority", one capable of overriding a Presidential veto. So the only way a Democratic program can pass is if Dubya signs off on it. That means that only the most timid and useless legislative initiatives from Democrats will, likely, become law. Again, big f*king deal.
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Will Democrats be able to restore high tax rates on the rich and super-rich, while keeping tax rates low or even cutting them for the middle class and poor? Not bloody likely.
+
Will Democrats be able to mandate a new, substantially higher minimum wage? Maybe. Maybe not.
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Will they be able to institute a national usury law in which anything over 10%, or even 20%, is illegal? No way in hell.
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Will they be able to institute universal health insurance so that no American has to die because s/he doesn't have medical insurance? Of course not. The rich would MUCH prefer that sick or injured Americans among the poor and middle class DIE than that the rich have to pay higher taxes. Literally. They would rather you DIE than that they have to pay higher taxes. DIE. And good riddance to you. If you're not rich, you deserve to die — that's the way the rich really do feel. If you didn't know that before today, I have told you now.
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Do you consent to die so the rich can keep more of "their" money (which has our name on it: "United States of America")? I don't. This trivial 7% election shift will not empower us to institute universal health coverage. Americans will continue to die from things they would survive if this country were not controlled by the rich and super-rich. And it is all the Democrats' fault. Because they could have won this election HUGELY if they had not contented themselves with winning a slim majority by hammering away only on an unpopular war, rather than on the one issue that really has people in this country feeling oppressed and desperate: personal debt and the usury that makes it all the worse.
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The Democrats now in power are not, I'm afraid, that much more the friend of the common man or woman than the Republicans have been. Their hearts may be in the right place, but, experientially, they have no idea what our lives are like. The System they are content to work within not merely favors the rich but also selects-for the rich, because nobody else can afford either the money or time away from work to run for office. So we get people who are deviant in the practical sense: people who are not remotely like us.
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For one thing, they are hugely richer than we are. The typical member of both houses of Congress is a millionaire, or very close to being a millionaire. Very few ordinary Americans are even remotely close to being millionaires. Essentially all members of Congress pay off their entire credit-card bill every month, so know nothing about interest rates charged by credit-card companies. They certainly know nothing about "default rates" of 27%, 34% and even more. They aren't charged any late fees or over-limit fees. They don't receive any dunning letters from collection agencies with red lettering on the front, or telephone calls at home and even at work harassing them for payment. They are so busy at a job they love (unlike most of us, who are lucky to have a job we can stand) that they don't have time to lie back in the recliner at nite and watch television — whereupon they would see commercial after commercial after commercial for debt counseling, debt consolidation loans, home equity loans to pay off bills, or any of the rest of the wallpaper of misery the rest of us see. And even if they did see it, they wouldn't know what they're seeing. They are that much out of touch.
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They wouldn't understand that the reason people might consider taking out a home-equity loan, and thus endangering their continued ownership of their house, is that they are drowning in consumer debt that carries usuriously high interest rates, so need desperately to find a way out. Our "Representatives" and Senators would think, if they thought about it at all, that people just want to have a little extra cash for luxuries, not that 234 million people in this country have no money for luxuries but can just barely get by, or are indeed falling further and further into debt every month — thanks to Congress letting lenders charge criminally high interest rates and impose astoundingly high fees on people in trouble. Never mind that interest IS a "late fee", such that the longer it takes you to pay off a loan, the more interest you have to pay. No, consumer-credit companies aren't satisfied with the very-high interest they charge as a base. They want to inflict a surcharge that ratchets the interest rate up into the stratosphere. And Congress does nothing, because the MEMBERS of Congress have no idea what the rest of us are going thru.
+
What will change with this new Congress?
+
As regards Iraq, the Democrats have no unified vision. Some want a timetable to be set and adhered to, as to permit phase-in of central-government force to maintain order. Some want the UN to take our place; some, the Arab League. Some want immediate withdrawal, the hell with the consequences. That is, if U.S. withdrawal should result in the takeover of Iraq by a military dictatorship (à la Saddam) or a Shiite or Sunni "Islamic Republic", so be it. Is that what we spent $300 billion and over 3,000 American lives (military and civilian) to achieve?
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The Democrats and Republicans are major parties not because they solve our problems or do our bidding but just because they are there, and have the money and 'troops' to maintain their position. They never solve any problem. They don't even know what it IS to solve a problem. Their thing is to make the people believe they are MANAGING the problem. If they were to SOLVE our problems, we wouldn't need them, would we? They make themselves needed by managing problems rather than solving them. And they keep everybody else off the ballot so the electorate will continue to believe there is no other way but to vote either Democratic or Republican, no third way.
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I'll let you in on a secret, folks. There IS another way. There are LOTS of other ways. The Expansionist Party, which I and a friend formed in 1977, has lots of the answers to lots of the problems of this country and the world, which cannot be solved unless we understand that bad borders are a very large part of the problem. You won't hear that in media. But you can see it on the Internet.
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Is the United States really doing so well with only two major parties controlling everything? Are our "Independents" really independent, or do they really align, almost uniformly, with one major party or the other?
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Is any solution to our most tenacious problems likely to come from the major parties? Or are they so implicated in the complex of forces they have set in motion or smiled upon that they cannot extricate us? Do they even care to extricate us?
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People who have criticized my approach, in establishing a "Third Party" rather than working within, say, the Democratic Party to aspire to high position or influence, and criticized the idea of Third Parties in general, need to reconsider. They say that a Third Party hasn't the chance of a snowball in Hell of winning the Presidency or dominating Congress. But what would the politics of the United States look like today if the Expansionist Party controlled 7% of Congress, the Republicans controlled 46%, and the Democrats controlled 47% of the votes? That would be a real 7% solution.
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Neither "major" party could pass so much as a single piece of legislation without either Expansionist votes or votes from defectors from within the other major party. Think about that. Third parties need not be powerless. They don't have to control a majority. They need merely be able to FORM a majority with a major party or coalition of forces from within the two major parties. That is a much lower standard for critical, even dominant influence than most people understand, isn't it?
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Think how the internal and external policies of the United States might look if (a) Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, united, were a State of the Union, with 2 votes in the Senate and 6 in the House (all these House numbers are predicated on enlargement of the House to accommodate new States, whether Congress were thereafter to decide to shrink the House back to 435 members, which would be absurd, or make the enlargement permanent); (b) Canada (which has universal healthcare) were brought into the Union as 7 states, with 14 votes in the Senate and 48 votes in the House; (c) Britain (which also has universal healthcare) became part of our Union as up to 5 states, with as many as 10 votes in the Senate and 87 votes in the House; (d) Mexico comprised 10 states of the Union, with 20 votes in the Senate and 160 votes in the House; (d) the Philippines were 3 states, with 6 votes in the Senate and 116 votes in the House; (e) Taiwan were a state, with 2 votes in the Senate and 33 Representatives; and (f) other areas, from the small insular territories of the West Indies and Guyana nearby, to the big, rich lands and large population of Brazil, to the hugely populous states of India were under our control and part of our national economy, and their people were completely fairly represented in Congress and the vote for President. And what if Iraq were admitted as a State of the Union, with 2 Senators and 36 Representatives, and U.S. antidiscrimination laws mandated fair treatment of Christians, Sunnis, and Shiites? If Israel were a State of the Union, and American antidiscrimination laws gave Moslem and Christian Palestinians absolute parity in law with Jews in historic Palestine?
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We need not be powerless to protect Amazonia, make India fair for Untouchables and Christians, end religious strife in the Mideast, or solve any of a host of other problems we now cannot touch.
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We can change the world, but in order to have the RIGHT to change the world, we have to grant that world rights to contribute to the central decisionmaking, in Congress and the White House, that affects them.
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That's what federalism is all about. Federalism is what empowered us, in our Thirteen very different original States, which had been separate for as much as 150 years before the Revolution, to entrust "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" to each other, and which has enabled us to make a single hugely wonderful Nation out of many separate groups: "E Pluribus Unum" indeed.
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The future is not for the timid. The future is OUT THERE, beyond our present borders. But, then, California was "out there" when the Thirteen Colonies became the Thirteen States. Few of the colonists of Virginia had ever even heard of California then. It was a world away, a conception away, part of the Spanish Empire, not something we needed to concern ourselves with. Today, it is our largest State (tho not, perhaps, wisest, given its vote for Governor last Tuesday).
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Who, in Massachusetts in 1787, had ever heard of "Texas" (then more likely spelled "Tejas"), home to our current President?
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The Constitution created a hollow form into which we could pour peoples and lands to create a harmonious Union, united not by sameness but by allegiance to an agreed set of principles, principles set out handily in a single legal document, the Constitution, and one nonlegal document, the Declaration of Independence. What holds us together is not our fractious and divided Congress, nor a divisive President who pretended to want to be a "uniter", but the principles we hold, equally and dearly, in our 300 million separate hearts: that "All men are created equal" stuff.
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That's what makes us a Nation. Not tribe, not race; not creed (religion); not land nor language nor culture. It's that "All men are created equal" stuff. We really believe it. And the world really needs it.
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Good fences may make good neighbors, but bad borders make a bad world.
____________________

The phrase "7% solution", which one can find in many uses, is a literary allusion to the fictional character Sherlock Holmes's using a 7% solution of cocaine in his recreational drug use. The author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries was a very odd bird who apparently did not fully appreciate how dangerous cocaine is, even tho he did have Dr. Watson actively disapprove of Holmes's drug use. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries are, apparently, available online, for free — if you don't mind reading at length from a monitor screen.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,844 — for Israel.) I'm starting to get depressed by this. I have wanted the military to hurt in order to make the people think about withdrawing from Iraq, and felt little or no sympathy for the people involved in this crime against Iraq. But now I'm oppressed by the numbers. Too many have died, on both sides. That far more Iraqis have died is small solace. I'm mourning the Americans too, now. It hurts. I didn't expect it to hurt, because I am so angry with the military, which is always, in every country, a force at odds with democracy. But the individual human Americans conned into joining the military, usually because their options in the private economy were poor, didn't usually have so much as the slitest idea what they were really to fite for (Israel), and didn't deserve to die in the dishonor they brought upon themselves by becoming conquerors and tyrants. It did not occur to them that they were sent to slaughter Iraqis to make Israel safe, not help Iraqis achieve democracy. I am very sad for them, and not just for their utterly needless sacrifice, but for the dishonor with which they left this world, when they thought they were doing the honorable thing.




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:07 PM

 
How Great Thou Art. I don't have time to say much about the election, and not all results are known even yet. Besides, every pundit on the planet has something to say, so you have enuf to read today. Suffice it to say that I am delited to have been wrong about neither house of Congress going Democratic, tho the margin of victory is too slim to permit a legislative program to sail thru or to override a Presidential veto.
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The moral of last nite's story is that despite everything the two parties have done to deprive people of choice, by gerrymandering pretty much every state to put Congressional (and other) seats safely into one party's pocket or the other, the people of the United States, in their majesty, rose up last nite to demand change.
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Democrats must make national legislation to abolish gerrymandering one of their very topmost priorities. Since even with gerrymandering the people can, if unhappy enuf, force change, let the major parties accept that having the people set the agenda really is best, and abolish party preference as a criterion for where the lines between legislative districts are set. We should have a "square deal" in redistricting, compact districts drawn as close to square as possible, starting in one corner of a state and proceeding to the opposite corner; and let the chips — and lines — fall where they may.
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Flip-Flopper. Last week our brave Commander-in-Chief said he would keep Donald Rumsfeld as his Secretary of Defense thru the end of the President's term, i.e., January 2009. Today he announced he had accepted Rumsfeld's resignation — after he met with his intended replacement over the weekend! Shocking. How can a man who made such a big deal in the last Presidential campaign about his opponent being a "flip-flopper" show such lack of stick-to-it-iveness? I'm so disappointed.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,839 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:18 PM

 
Unopposed; Hope vs. Expectation. I was just waking up today when a recorded election message from Joe Piscopo came in on my answering machine. The bastard says, 'I'm a Democrat, but I'm voting for Tom Kean' (the odious Republican blueblood who has slandered not just his opponent but also Democrats generally in one of the nastiest campaigns New Jersey has ever seen). I hung up. I never particularly cared for Piscopo — tho he did have a great body, last I saw, and showed pride in being from New Jersey. Still, he is now officially on my sh*tlist for advocating that this very Blue State go Red.
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I have mentioned that some 64 seats in Congress are unopposed each election cycle. When I received my sample ballot last week, I discovered that my Congressman, Donald Payne, holds one of them. That's disgraceful. There is almost no chance that I would vote for a Republican for Congress, but I and other voters in the three counties that comprise the 10th Congressional District should have a choice.
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The sample ballot shows that we have three public-policy issues to decide, so I still need to vote, especially in that the race for U.S. Senate is very close. It's important that we vote for Robert Menendez today, and defeat the beast Kean. (An astounding typo appears in a TV spot in which Newark's popular young mayor, Cory Booker, and various other officeholders urge us to vote a straight Line A slate (Democratic). At the very top of the closing screen that lists the Democrats on that line appears "Mendendez". MenDendez. How could that happen? Some people just don't see typos.)
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The first ballot question asks if we should shift some of the state sales tax revenues for "property-tax relief". The effect of this would be to move money from the poor, who don't own real estate, to the middle class and rich who do. While I own property and that measure would benefit me, I already get a property-tax rebate, so I am voting against it. Sales-tax revenues should support programs for all the people. The poor should not be compelled to subsidize the middle class and rich.
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The second measure would amend the state constitution to allow the shifting of some money from hazardous waste cleanup and water-quality programs on open lands to recreational facilities on those lands. I don't think New Jersey, as the most densely populated state in the Nation, with one of the highest concentrations (if not very highest) of Superfund hazardous-waste sites, should be taking money away from cleaning up that mess, so no, I won't vote for that either. We are a rich state. If we want to create baseball fields or tennis courts on public lands, we can afford to do that without taking away from water-quality programs.
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The third measure proposes to amend the state constitution to increase the proportion of the gasoline tax that goes to public transportation. I really don't think trivia like this belongs in a state CONSTITUTION, but since it is, and we need to encourage and improve public transportation, I'll vote yes on that one.
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Now, what do I foresee happening today, nationally? I don't predict. I don't pretend that I can see into the future. I do have hopes, but today I also have contrary expectations. I hope the Democrats will rout the Republicans, repudiate the Bush Administration, and force an early withdrawal from Iraq and reversal of the domestic war against the poor and middle class that the Republican Plutocratic Revolution has waged since Reagan's 1986 tax 'reform' (revolution). I'm not sanguine* about that, however. I don't think there is enuf play in the system for there to be a massive change. Too many "safe seats" have been created by gerrymandering in essentially all states for there to be massive swings. Tho I would dearly love to see a Democratic sweep, I don't see how it can happen.
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Frankly, since the Democrats have refused to address the key bread-and-butter issues (like personal debt and usury, despite my repeated urgings), I am very afraid they will fail to take either house, and we will be stuck with the present politics of greed and division for another two years.
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Almost all of the media pundits I have heard seem to think the Republicans will lose the House, tho not necessarily by much, and feel certain the Dems have little chance to take the Senate. I'm afraid the Democrats will lose both, and the same evil that controlled the Nation yesterday will control the Nation tomorrow. I sure hope I'm wrong.
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* Jon Stewart on the Daily Show last nite mispronounced "sanguine", saang.gwéen and was reproached for it by his guest, Jerry Seinfeld, who remarked, 'This is the most intelligent show on television. You can't mispronounce words!' I agree. That's why I'm a spelling reformer, because even intelligent people can be easily misled into embarrassing errors by our present, nonphonetic orthography. I'm using "sanguine" as my Simpler Spelling Word of the Day today.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,837 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:58 PM

 
Bell Tolls for Bush? In 1623 the British poet John Donne wrote a passage that has resounded thru all the ages since:*

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death for what has always been regarded as the right of a government to do as it chooses, according to its own lites, and for which "sovereign immunity" has always applied: that no one is qualified to judge the actions of a government. A new standard is now arising that claims majesty for a supposed universal standard of decency and justice that has never been discussed, debated, or voted upon by any world congress, and is in fact not universally agreed. Rather, a group of mainly Western, industrialized nations has taken upon itself to define morality for the entire planet. However, the acts of the West's own elected governments are still to be protected by a type of sovereign immunity, in which (for instance) George Bush and his ilk can invade a country 7,000 miles from our nearest shore, kill tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people, and never be held to account.
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How long can such an inconsistency last? Will Bush and his entire Administration — and the members of Congress who have backed their crimes — one day be hauled before the dock of an international war-crimes tribunal and given the same death sentence as Saddam?
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Saddam is to be hanged for killing 148 people without, as his present judges see things, justification. A court under Saddam's government, however, might well have consigned all 148 of those people to death according to their own standards of propriety. So what we have here is just another case of "might makes right". We have the power to do something, so we do it. If we lose that power and other people, with other ideas, take over, they will change the standards and condemn us as we condemn them.
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As I pointed out here one week ago, the U.S. war against Iraq has killed huge numbers of Iraqis, and produced chaos that kills more every day. There was no such internal chaos under Saddam. We have discovered. after three years of unending violence, what Saddam Hussein knew from the outset: Iraq is a very hard place to govern, and you can't control the violent passions of its fractious and splintered population with gentle admonitions and the ordinary police activity of advanced industrial nations. Saddam knew that the only way to maintain peace and keep Iraqis from slaughtering each other by the tens of thousands was to rule with an iron hand. Now we are trying to rule with an iron hand. What's the difference? Only that we are foreigners trying to rule with an iron hand, and Iraqis who would tolerate one of their own imposing a military dictatorship are not so willing to accept a military dictatorship imposed by foreigners. Who can blame them?
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We didn't accept the right of the King of England to rule us with an iron hand, and came to regard our onetime fellow countrymen as foreigners who needed to go home and leave us alone. We went to war to force them out of our country. It was not a gentle war. It was horrible, horrible, horrible, filled with atrocities, and not just from the British side. At end, "the British" (as we came to call them, tho before that war we were all British) decided that the war was both unwinnable and not worth the trouble, so packed up their bags and went home. At end, we too will pack up our bags and leave Iraq.
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There was no international tribunal to arrest King George III and condemn him to death for the devastation he inflicted on his former colonies. Three years from now, or ten years, or twenty, there may very well be an international tribunal to arrest George Bush and his entire Administration, indeed every member of Congress who voted repeatedly to start and continue this horrible war, and condemn them all to death.
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Saddam was condemned for 'crimes' that his GOVERNMENT (not he, personally) committed in 1982, 24 years ago. But governments determine what are and are not crimes. The incident at trial was a counterattack by the GOVERNMENT against an attempted ASSASSINATION of the President of Iraq. I believe we too have laws against assassinating the President, laws that carry the death penalty. Hm. If someone assassinated President Bush (one can only wish) and was executed for that act, would an international tribunal 24 years later condemn to hanging, the entire governmental structure that carried out that execution? One must wonder.
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Sovereign immunity, like amnesty for combatants in war, is not so much a moral issue as a practical matter: it is more important to have governments be able to act than to keep governments paralyzed by fear that decades later, somebody will second-guess every decision taken, and it is more important to end a war than to insist on executing people who dare to rise in arms against you. We screw around with sovereign immunity only at our own great peril.
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Hypocrisy on Sex. Evangelical preacher Ted Haggard's removal as pastor of a Colorado mega-church due to 'sexual misconduct' (with men, apparently), coming within weeks of the resignation of a conservative Republican Congressman for sexual lewdness toward very young men, shows yet again what trouble society gets itself into in trying to deny the power and legitimacy of homosexuality. As Evan Derkacz, an editor of AlterNet.org, observed today:

Jack Balkin, typically a constitutional lawyer and professor, connects the psychology to the policy rhetoric: Viewed from Ted Haggard's perspective — a man who, despite his shame and guilt, is attracted to other men — gay marriage and the gay lifestyle really are a threat to heterosexual relationships and heterosexual marriage. That is because they are a threat to his heterosexual identity and his heterosexual marriage.

But why should a man with overwhelmingly powerful homosexual urges feel he should have a heterosexual identity? It's exactly like lefthanded people feeling they should be righthanded. Our word "sinister" comes from the Latin word of the same spelling, which means, simply, "left". A cultural and linguistic bias against lefthandedness has existed in societies all over the world for a very long time, and pressures to compel lefthanded children to conform to righthandedness have been found in many societies. Even in the United States not long ago, it was common for teachers to encourage or even require children to write with their right hand.
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All kinds of rationalizations have been given for this attempt to compel conformity, such as the 'facts' that scissors, can-openers, and other devices are designed for righthanded people, and that Chinese characters are easier to write correctly with the right hand. But there is nothing "sinister" about lefthandedness, and inventors have created plenty of devices for lefthanded people. In the personal-computer world, there's a simple command to shift the functions of mouse buttons from one side to the other. Still, prejudice against lefthandedness persists in many societies.
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A lot of people just have trouble with difference.
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As regards homosexuality, I can't imagine there is more than a tiny fraction of the male population that hasn't so much as thought about sex with another guy, at some point from the onset of puberty. Fascination with one's own body easily expands to fascination with the bodies of people like oneself. Some people feel no need to go beyond that. So society, which until very recent times was perpetually at the edge of extinction, had to encourage reproduction and thus discourage nonreproductive sex.
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The present Western bias against homosexuality comes from Judaism, the cult of a tiny tribal society surrounded by powerful enemies. If the Hebrews were to survive, they would need the power of numbers to field against their many enemies. The antihomosexual bias of Judaism was picked up by early Christianity, not from the teachings of Jesus, who never said Word One against homosexuality, but from the teachings of Saul of Tarsus, the Jewish persecutor of early Christians who was overcome with guilt and converted to the faith he had been trying to exterminate, after a supposed "religious experience" on the road to Damascus. Saul became Paul, "Saint" Paul, but intruded his Jewish antihomosexual bias into his version of Christianity. Never mind that "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," Jesus's very most fundamental teaching, plainly smiles (widely and britely) upon homosexuality.
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Today, the exact opposite of the demographic condition of the human race thru most of history is true: it is not paucity of numbers but excess numbers that endanger us. If reason were the motive force behind social policy, then, the world would be doing everything in its power to promote not just homosexuality but exclusive homosexuality, so people could fully satisfy their sexual nature without producing (unwanted and unsupportable) children. Alas, reason has very little to do with social policy.
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Insecurity among white Americans that they are being out-reproduced by nonwhites even in their own country, and that they will be reduced to a tiny, and then oppressed, minority helps keep flagging antihomosexual bigotry alive. We are told, in effect, that we are in a reproductive arms race in which the (white) West is being drowned in a sea of brown and black people, as the populations of Third World countries rise while white countries' populations are not even replacing themselves. Rather than reform our immigration laws to exclude nonwhites, which we are perfectly well entitled to do if we are really worried that our civilization will come tumbling into rubble if present demographic trends continue, or promoting homosexuality in the Third World to reduce its population relative to ours, we are to encourage white people to have more babies than they want or can easily afford, and oppress gay people. Not smart, not wise, not moral.
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Forcing people to deny their nature is bad public policy. Not only does it produce grievous unhappiness in the people made to hate themselves, but it inevitably drags others into that unhappiness. How did former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey's wife and two children take the news that he is a "Gay American"? How did Ted Haggard's wife and five children take the news that he is insuperably and irresistibly drawn to men? How did the conservatives 'betrayed' in 1980 by Maryland Congressman Robert Bauman, and the conservatives 'betrayed' this year by Florida Congressman Mark Foley, feel about that 'betrayal'? There may be other names soon to drop:

The New Republic's Michael Crowley . . . notes David Corn's report on "The List" — a document being passed around political circles of high-level Republican congressional aides who are gay.

Corn, a liberal, says he will not publish The List, even though he has a copy. Here's his conclusion:

Let's be clear about one thing: the Mark Foley scandal is not about homosexuality. Some family value conservatives are suggesting it is. But anytime a gay Republican is outed by events, a dicey issue is raised: what about those GOPers who are gay and who serve a party that is anti-gay? Are they hypocrites, opportunists, or just confused individuals? Is it possible to support a party because you adhere to most of its tenets — even if that party refuses to recognize you as a full citizen? The men on The List might want to think hard about these questions — as they probably already have — for if I have a copy of The List, there's a good chance it will be appearing soon on a website near everyone.

That was published at CBS.com on October 5th, and the concern reflected there has not come to pass:

In the coming days, we may see the Foley story morph into a referendum on gay Republicans — particularly if the G.O.P. continues to push the storyline that Foley was protected by "a network of gay staffers and gay members."

In fact, I had never before today, in searching for the full name of Congressman Foley, even heard of "The List".
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The point, however, is that there are a lot of people who could be embarrassed (at the least) by revelations of their true nature. But why should there be a conflict between being homosexual and being socially conservative? What legitimate public interest is served in making people hate themselves and be miserable? Wouldn't it be better for everybody if gay men could be open about their feelings and settle into stable, long-term, loving relationships rather than be forced to furtive meetings in dangerous places, and lives of promiscuity and instability because society works tirelessly to prevent them from forming long-term relationships?
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Society is happiest when its members are happy. Promoting unhappiness is not in the public interest.
____________________

The longer quotation (717 words) from Donne that this famed passage derives from is quite different from what one might expect. You might check it out sometime when philosophically inclined.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,836 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:47 PM