An observation, a simple observation.

Sarah Palin's Magical Mystery Tour is coming to my part of the country. I don't know who she thinks she's kidding but we're not frontier idiots here. They're not even frontier idiots in the frontier, because people in all places are smarter than she and her cohort give them credit for--and considering how dumb people are this is saying something. So she can get on her high horse and ride the fuck out of Dodge.

Ahem. That is all.

Confessions of a religious-leftist

I don't ENJOY identifying as progressive/liberal. I really don't. I have very serious and basic disagreements with the fundamental view/views of existence (secular, rationalistic, et cetera) on which most people who share my policy positions seem to base them. I'm lonely.

'People may not believe it but I advise you all to check your Bibles more closely. God mandates this [radical redistribution of wealth] in Amos and most of the minor Prophets, as well as by implication in Jeremiah, in the Synoptic Gospels, and even in Leviticus 25. It was good for Paul and Silas and it is good enough for me. It is good enough for America, too.'

This is how I debate with radical libertarians.

'God is Love and Love is Justice. Justice entails dealing fairly in human affairs, not denying people the rights that you would not have them deny you. Love is so fundamental that the right to civil recognition of romantic commitment regardless of sex (as civil recognition of familial and professional commitment pays no regard to sex) can be counted a basic human right. And ‘to turn aside human rights before the face of the Most High, to subvert a man in his cause, the Lord approveth not’ (Lamentations 3.35-6). God is Love, God is the source of love, God is concurrent to love, and any love that does not destroy the lovers flows from God and is with Divine blessings. If it is love, and if it is beautiful, is all that matters. In love the moral becomes the aesthetic, the aesthetic the moral. God did not institute the fact of love for some brute material teleology like sex and reproduction. God instituted the fact of love because He is Love. In the end nobody is free from experience; all our experiences are the same, so please don't be cruel.'

This is how I explain my support for gay marriage.

It's not always easy to hold what is fundamentally an un-Enlightenment (not anti-Enlightenment, simply un-) view of the world in a political culture that still thinks that John Locke was a pretty swell guy (and not one of the founding fathers of the Atlantic Slave Trade and an all-around bastard who got off on the thought of genocide in the name of white people's so-called 'private property' rights). In fact it's typically extremely difficult whenever discussion turns from policy issues to the underlying philosophy. I don't know what to do. I'm starting to think that because I'm in a minority therefore I must be wrong.

Book Review: Escape to Hell and Other Stories

There comes a time in every great dictator's life when he puts pen to paper and writes a series of quasi-philosophical, Gonzo short stories that address themes of urban alienation, the pharmacisation of emotional problems, family dilemmas, and the flatness of a globalised world, which then get published as a proper, bound, English-language book, with a foreword by former White House Press Secretary and United States Senator Pierre Salinger.

Well, actually, no, that is not true. That only applies to Muammar al-Qaddafi, the David Bowie of modern tyrants, who wrote Escape to Hell and Other Stories in the early 1990s, one of the better (or less horrifically godawful) periods of his rule over the Great Socialist Libyan Arab People's State of the Masses. Qaddafi apparently was trying, at the time, to reinvent himself as a serious, if deliberately unpalatable to Western post-Enlightenment sensibilities, political 'wise man' along the lines of Sayyid Qutb or Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. Escape to Hell was his Eoineen of the Birds, an intended sally of the political into realms of serious cultural production, and what a quixotic sally it is.

Pierre Salinger, who wrote the foreword for Qaddafi's short-story collection, is of course the famed reporter-turned-Kennedy Administration official-turned-appointed Senator from California-turned-reporter-turned-conspiracy theorist worryingly reminiscent of Maniwa from Paranoia Agent. With his gushing attitude towards the work, Salinger betrays either an excessively loose adherence to his own culture's political mores (such as representative democracy, an independent judiciary, minority rights, or the rule of law), poor literary taste unfortunate given his apparent distant relation to the author of Franny and Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye, or both. I'm going to go with both, for now, and get on to the bulk of the Colonel's work.

Escape to Hell's title story is one of the few with anything like a recognisable plot, although it is really more like a broad-strokes historical fable describing the urbanisation of Arab/North African culture in the modern age, a process of which the author disapproves. Thematically it is similar in this respect to a certain subset of classic Westerns, though I do not doubt that the author and, for instance, John Wayne would fall in hate at first sight. It is by no means badly-written--it is spare and has a certain grim elegance similar to that of the desert that Qaddafi calls home--and its themes, unlike the themes of pretty much everything else in the Qaddafi ouevre, can be reasonably defended as serious literary explorations of alienation and the demysitification of the world.

After this, the only part of the book that can really be classified as a story, Qaddafi abandons plot, characters, dialogue, and the other markers of narrative writing in favour of a more stream-of-conscious, almost Gonzo style, with which he tells the stories of, among other things, his own childhood, a shady pharmacist in Benghazi who moonlights as a drug dealer (it is clear that Qaddafi was under the influence of this gentleman's wares when he wrote about him), Operation El Dorado Canyon (though only in passing), and a family of Touaregs that he claims to know but which may well be yet another surprising use of actual fiction in this ostensible short-story collection.

Escape into Hell is not a good book in the conventional sense, but it is an interesting book and at least not as horribly written and utterly unengrossing as many other tyrants' screeds, such as Qaddafi's own non-fictional (in the same way that Escape into Hell is fictional, which is to say not very) Green Book. The foreword reveals worrying things about Pierre Salinger, the title story reminds one somewhat of a desert Charles Portis albeit one who is phoning it in, and the rest of the book is useful for its glimpse into the mind and self-justifications and rationalisations of the man whose name is so commonly followed by '--must go now' in the news these days.

Also, 'Pierre Salinger, who wrote the foreword for Qaddafi's short-story collection' is the second most surprising-even-to-me phrase I have written to-day, after 'Unleash nerd rage: Target: Neil Gaiman'.

Hi, I'm from the Family Research Council, and our Research indicates that your Family is evil.

Currently involved in America's politics are two outfits called the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council. It would be natural to assume that these groups would have fairly broad bases of support for ideals relating to marriages and families. It would be natural, but it would be wrong, because of how these people's support for 'marriage' and 'family' is calibrated.

Here is a hint: Their support for such things is almost always based on their support for their marriages and their families. This is perfectly natural and even admirable, since it shows that they are to at least some extent grounded in a reality that they can perceive rather than high-flown ideologies alone. It only becomes problematic when you realise why these people like their own marriages and families.

They love their spouses and families, essentially, for the same reason that one might love a myna bird.

As long as Maggie Gallagher's marriage continues to be heterosexual and as long as Tony Perkins's family continues to be whitebread, they'll support them, and hence 'marriage' and 'family' in general, because they define marriage and family in terms of their own experience without any caring for what other people's marriages or other people's families might be like. But the second one thing goes awry--the second Maggie Gallagher interacts with a married couple who are the same sex, or of different ideologies or backgrounds, or in any other way noticeably different from her own--the mask collapses. And if Tony Perkins was suddenly in a world in which one of his children was gay, or had leftist sympathies, or was forced to drop out of high school to have her rapist's baby, then I don't doubt that he'd turn on them and everything they cared about, like Alan Keyes did with his lesbian daughter. I have seen this happen with very conservative families again and again, and in my view one of the saving graces of very conservative families, the way that you can tell that the members of a particular very conservative family really love each other, are a real family, and mean serious business with their love, is them not doing this if the situation arises. (This is, for instance, the one thing that, if anything will, could possibly lead Dick Cheney to redemption.)

I don't mean to sound alarmist or over-the-top. I genuinely think that this is how venal, self-serving, hypocritcal, and bigoted these people's reasons for supporting 'marriage' and 'family' as concepts are. I know that they outright oppose gay people's marriages and gay people's families and hate their members and want them to go away and be miserable and die. I don't doubt that many of them have similar feelings on interracial marriages--after all, one of the only interracial couples in the Bible was also lesbian--or extended families--giving a shit about anybody whose relation to you can't be easily explained with 'I had sex with X' is DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO COMMUNISM, obviously--or anything else that forces them to remember that 'marriage' and 'family' aren't concepts that their marriages and their families have a global fucking monopoly over, that people who aren't like them exist, that other types of love exist, and that they have to share the world with other living things that have loved ones and human relationships just like they do.

It's worse than bigotry. It's a desire for outright and absolute control over what constitutes marriage, what constitutes family, and, in the end, what constitutes love.

Please, for all that's good and holy, with the love of your marriage (if you have one) and your family (we all have our family, whatever that may be), resist them. Resist them, for the good of America, and for the good of love.

A comment from thehill.com

'There are alot of problems with the Dream Act.

1, 35 age limit too old.
2, It is ongoing - never ending.
3. Once these illegal aliens get to be citizens they will be busy sponsoring their illegal families into the country. So the number involved in the amnesty is a lot more than just the one student - you all are forgetting about their families members,'

illegal families

ILLEGAL FAMILIES

ILLEGAL
FAMILIES.

I'm sorry. This person has just lost the right to hold forth on any issue of rights or dignities ever again.

I mean really.

REALLY.

What I realised

What the right wing of the Republican Party is telling Americans, and has been telling them ever since Barry Goldwater fell from grace and took whatever HONESTY was involved in American conservatism with him, is actually very simple. It's simple, and it's clear, and it's what people want to hear because we're so masochistically in love with capitalism in this country: 'You're not a person. You're not a real child of God or of America. You're just a factor to be solved for on a rabid graphing calculator.

'You're not a person. You're just the profiteer class's good little property, and we'll keep you placated with our talk of a 'freedom' that has no sense of either mercy or justice. Chaos except for the profiteer class. Sink or swim. Social Darwinism for everyone!--and by the way, the same theory applied to biology is Satanic. Tough on crime, except when it's by bankers or against women and minorities. It's perfectly fine to fool around with secretaries but if you dissemble and then apologise rather than just denying it we'll impeach you and if you're a homo we'll dehumanise you and use you as an 'issue'.

'America, America! Die for America! Only in America. An America of the banks, a kind of banking that would make Alexander Hamilton spew. America for the insurers who gamble on the right to good health. America for the people who two hundred years ago would have made it just fine in Britain or Germany or anyplace else.' What, then, exactly, is the point?

This doesn't necessarily apply to the right in other countries. Some countries, like Australia and Germany, have (vaguely) more moderate political consensus. Some, like Japan, don't even HAVE left and right, just different interest sections in the Diet. I'm not outright condemning conservatism and calling it inhuman. I'm only condemning American conservatism in the year 2010 and calling it inhuman. There is a difference, and it is chasmal in its depth and breadth and dolorous in the fate that it bespells for a perfectly acceptable word and concept that's being twisted into that special blend of radical libertarianism, I've-got-mine pillaging, and dehumanisation of the Other that, back when 'conservative' meant 'just kind of a killjoy' and 'liberal' meant 'just kind of a dick', Edmund Burke was trying to WARN us about.

Australian conservatives? Okay by me. British conservatives? Go nuts. Japanese conservatives? Fine. Mexican conservatives? Not my thing, but hey, if that's what makes you happy, go for it. American conservatives at other points in history? Probably right about some things.

Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Glenn Beck, Sharron Angle? It's not even clear that you even like this country, guys. You're certainly not willing to pay for its upkeep, for one thing. Even if you excuse yourself with American liberty you're just fooling yourself because liberty defined in the negative is a Julianic 'no-deed'. Seriously, if you really dislike America and American justice and American mercy so much, get the fuck out.  It'll be easier on us and on you.