The Passion of the Sullivan

I haven't looked in at Homo Superior much lately. He's changed the layout several times, it seems, in interesting but still sometimes confusing ways. On the other hand I've neglected several places I used to visit almost daily, like a chat room where I used to be a contentious regular; I looked in there and found to my pleasure that it's still busy when most chat rooms have dried up. Now that I think of it, though, Homo Superior has been relatively quiet, and today I learned why, from his personal blog, now retitled Rick Has Cancer, which he'll be fighting for some time. I'm rooting for him.

But the main reason I'm writing about him today is that at HSB he posted a response to Andrew Sullivan fussing over a satirical Easter skit by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, mocking the Roman Catholic Church. Sullivan called it "bigotry," while loudly protesting his dedication to free speech and "the right to blasphemy", and then fumed:

You want to grow some balls? Hold a Hunky Mohammed Contest on Ramadan. And, by the way, thanks for doing your bit to empower every religious right prejudice about gays.

Oh, dear. As though the Sisters and all us trashy radical homos don't have balls already! We were born with them, which is more than can be said about our homosexuality. But Sullivan has very traditional views of gender, as of so many things except his homosexuality. Again: Roman Catholicism is a lifestyle choice, so those who adhere to it had better develop thicker skins, just as we queers, leftists, and atheists have to do. I find the digs many atheists make at religion childish, uninformed, and tiresome, but the defenses made by people like Sullivan are no better. And Sullivan has a long record of ignorant, childish attacks on people he doesn't like; as a First Amendment absolutist dedicated to the right of blasphemy, I defend his right to make them, but I don't have to respect his views.

Homo Superior mounts his own critique of Sullivan and Christianity. He recalls attending Easter Services with his mother at her Pentecostal church, "a night of theater depicting the Passion of Christ."

I thought it would be an easy way to assuage my mother’s worries over my backslidden state without having to hear the anti-gay rhetoric so common to churches of this type.

Instead, I was treated to an over-the-top presentation of the Torture of Christ, not his Passion: Tableaux after tableaux of suffering and death. Rather than being edified, I was embarrassed. I felt like my nose was being rubbed in the private, fucked up, quasi-sexual, sado-maschochistic fantasies of a cult; and they were using it to try to indoctrinate me.

The bloodless Resurrection, not surprisingly, got less than 30 seconds.

Oh, dear. The word "passion" in English, in the context of Christianity, means "suffering", specifically referring to Jesus' suffering on the cross. It only came to refer to sexual love in the 1500s, and to strong feeling of any kind a century later. So HS is drawing a false distinction. As he must know, "tableaux after tableaux of suffering and death" have been a standby of Christian imagery and story for centuries, as in the "passion plays" of the medieval church. I think it would be sensible to ask why people are so fascinated by dwelling on the details of Jesus' suffering, but why not? Depictions of tormented human bodies are common and popular in drama and other media for millennia, from the Greek tragedies onward. The problem of suffering is an ancient one: why is the world so ordered that people suffer and die? It's at the core of Buddhism too. Projecting human pain onto a god is one way of trying to come to terms with it, even if it's not one that I find useful. Stressing Jesus' suffering is, if nothing else, a dramatic device to make his resurrection all the more a relief, to make sure the audience knows that their god did really bleed for them. I don't think it's surprising or sinister that ordinary folk like the idea of a god who suffered as they suffer, bled, and died; his triumph over death is a promise that they will triumph over it too. I don't believe that promise, but I think most people want to believe it or something like it.

HS is making the same mistake so many of my fellow atheists make: he talks about religion as though it were some alien force or structure imposed by a conspiratorial organization on The People. As I've said before, religion is something that people make up (including the conspirators, if you want to see religious leaders and teachers that way), and themes that occur and recur in religion do so because they matter to people. The passion plays wouldn't have endured if people didn't find them affecting. People aren't passive receptacles for the Church to fill with its doctrines: they reject or dodge what they don't like. (A favorite example of mine is the prohibition of fornication -- that is, sexual intercourse between unmarried people, as opposed to adultery where at least one partner is married. The Catholic Church has been trying for centuries to get the laity to agree that fornication is a no-no, with limited success at best.) I believe that the atheists who like to see religion as purely a form of control from above are those who want to be controllers from above themselves.

HS continues with another popular infidel's cliche, a nonbeliever's counterpart of Sullivan's dig about a "Hunky Mohammed contest":

Further, it’s my understanding from my brief studies in Bible school that, had Christ been born and died in modern times, a shot to the head from a Kalashnikov would have done the trick just as well as days on the cross. It just wouldn’t have been as much fun for Christians to reenact later.

Really? You have to learn that in Bible school? So what? If Jesus had died by some other means, his followers would have rationalized that just as they did the cross. (When the 17th century messianic pretender Sabbatai Sevi converted to Islam rather than suffer execution, those of his followers who didn't fall away imitated his example, converting to Islam but practicing Judaism in secret. They found Biblical passages which they interpreted as prophecies of Sabbatai's apostasy, just as Christians did for Jesus' death and resurrection.)

It’s no accident that the two principal icons of the Catholic Church, and of much of the rest of Christianity, are on the one hand, a nearly naked man in agony and ecstasy eternally dying on a cross, and on the other, a virgin mother in a burka.

"No accident" indeed, since Jesus was probably crucified (it's not the sort of thing that Christians would have made up, it was too shameful, like, say, dying of AIDS would be now), not killed by firing squad or a bow and arrow. Icons of divine mothers are cross-culturally popular, and it's widely believed that the cult of Mary descends from the cult of Isis/Ishtar. But what does this "no accident" mean? HS obviously think it has some sinister significance, but doesn't say what, except that he thinks it should be "the empty tomb plated in gold and hanging around the necks of believers", instead of a cross. I'm surprised that Calvary Tabernacle dwelt on the Passion so much on Sunday instead of Good Friday, when such things usually are done. Easter, judging by what I hear from Christians I know, means sunrise services in commemoration of the gospels' discovery of the empty tomb at dawn.

Well, there's no reason non-theists should be any better informed about Christianity than Christians are. But we can't claim to be more rational, or wiser, or more realistic about the world than the religious if we aren't better informed. Homo Superior complains about the passion play he witnessed:

Rather than being edified, I was embarrassed. I felt like my nose was being rubbed in the private, fucked up, quasi-sexual, sado-maschochistic fantasies of a cult; and they were using it to try to indoctrinate me.

Why would anyone be "indoctrinated" by this spectacle? Wouldn't an outsider -- a genuine outsider, I mean, not a lapsed Christian -- simply be repelled by it? (This complaint reminds me of antihomosexual Christians who raise the alarm about how homosexuals are trying to recruit ("indoctrinate") outsiders with our disgusting sexual practices and our leather daddies, which I would think an odd way to entice potential converts. For all that Pentecostals are eager to make recruits, I'd take that performance as something for the already converted. (Much like the "Hunky Jesus" contest: it wasn't supposed to win bigots over, or to counter bigots' stereotypes about gays -- it was an event for the already "converted.")

For that matter, what's wrong with "sado-masochistic fantasies"? Again, they play a role in religion because they play a role in many people's lives; they play a highly visible role in gay male sexual iconography, however little they interest me. When antigay Christians fulminate about the disgusting aspects of gay life, we tend to suspect that covertly they find those aspects attractive, even exciting; I have similar suspicions about Homo Superior's (and other nonbelievers') fixation on the Passion drama -- and about Andrew Sullivan's outrage at the Hunky Jesus contest.

The Passion of the Sullivan

I haven't looked in at Homo Superior much lately. He's changed the layout several times, it seems, in interesting but still sometimes confusing ways. On the other hand I've neglected several places I used to visit almost daily, like a chat room where I used to be a contentious regular; I looked in there and found to my pleasure that it's still busy when most chat rooms have dried up. Now that I think of it, though, Homo Superior has been relatively quiet, and today I learned why, from his personal blog, now retitled Rick Has Cancer, which he'll be fighting for some time. I'm rooting for him.

But the main reason I'm writing about him today is that at HSB he posted a response to Andrew Sullivan fussing over a satirical Easter skit by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, mocking the Roman Catholic Church. Sullivan called it "bigotry," while loudly protesting his dedication to free speech and "the right to blasphemy", and then fumed:

You want to grow some balls? Hold a Hunky Mohammed Contest on Ramadan. And, by the way, thanks for doing your bit to empower every religious right prejudice about gays.

Oh, dear. As though the Sisters and all us trashy radical homos don't have balls already! We were born with them, which is more than can be said about our homosexuality. But Sullivan has very traditional views of gender, as of so many things except his homosexuality. Again: Roman Catholicism is a lifestyle choice, so those who adhere to it had better develop thicker skins, just as we queers, leftists, and atheists have to do. I find the digs many atheists make at religion childish, uninformed, and tiresome, but the defenses made by people like Sullivan are no better. And Sullivan has a long record of ignorant, childish attacks on people he doesn't like; as a First Amendment absolutist dedicated to the right of blasphemy, I defend his right to make them, but I don't have to respect his views.

Homo Superior mounts his own critique of Sullivan and Christianity. He recalls attending Easter Services with his mother at her Pentecostal church, "a night of theater depicting the Passion of Christ."

I thought it would be an easy way to assuage my mother’s worries over my backslidden state without having to hear the anti-gay rhetoric so common to churches of this type.

Instead, I was treated to an over-the-top presentation of the Torture of Christ, not his Passion: Tableaux after tableaux of suffering and death. Rather than being edified, I was embarrassed. I felt like my nose was being rubbed in the private, fucked up, quasi-sexual, sado-maschochistic fantasies of a cult; and they were using it to try to indoctrinate me.

The bloodless Resurrection, not surprisingly, got less than 30 seconds.

Oh, dear. The word "passion" in English, in the context of Christianity, means "suffering", specifically referring to Jesus' suffering on the cross. It only came to refer to sexual love in the 1500s, and to strong feeling of any kind a century later. So HS is drawing a false distinction. As he must know, "tableaux after tableaux of suffering and death" have been a standby of Christian imagery and story for centuries, as in the "passion plays" of the medieval church. I think it would be sensible to ask why people are so fascinated by dwelling on the details of Jesus' suffering, but why not? Depictions of tormented human bodies are common and popular in drama and other media for millennia, from the Greek tragedies onward. The problem of suffering is an ancient one: why is the world so ordered that people suffer and die? It's at the core of Buddhism too. Projecting human pain onto a god is one way of trying to come to terms with it, even if it's not one that I find useful. Stressing Jesus' suffering is, if nothing else, a dramatic device to make his resurrection all the more a relief, to make sure the audience knows that their god did really bleed for them. I don't think it's surprising or sinister that ordinary folk like the idea of a god who suffered as they suffer, bled, and died; his triumph over death is a promise that they will triumph over it too. I don't believe that promise, but I think most people want to believe it or something like it.

HS is making the same mistake so many of my fellow atheists make: he talks about religion as though it were some alien force or structure imposed by a conspiratorial organization on The People. As I've said before, religion is something that people make up (including the conspirators, if you want to see religious leaders and teachers that way), and themes that occur and recur in religion do so because they matter to people. The passion plays wouldn't have endured if people didn't find them affecting. People aren't passive receptacles for the Church to fill with its doctrines: they reject or dodge what they don't like. (A favorite example of mine is the prohibition of fornication -- that is, sexual intercourse between unmarried people, as opposed to adultery where at least one partner is married. The Catholic Church has been trying for centuries to get the laity to agree that fornication is a no-no, with limited success at best.) I believe that the atheists who like to see religion as purely a form of control from above are those who want to be controllers from above themselves.

HS continues with another popular infidel's cliche, a nonbeliever's counterpart of Sullivan's dig about a "Hunky Mohammed contest":

Further, it’s my understanding from my brief studies in Bible school that, had Christ been born and died in modern times, a shot to the head from a Kalashnikov would have done the trick just as well as days on the cross. It just wouldn’t have been as much fun for Christians to reenact later.

Really? You have to learn that in Bible school? So what? If Jesus had died by some other means, his followers would have rationalized that just as they did the cross. (When the 17th century messianic pretender Sabbatai Sevi converted to Islam rather than suffer execution, those of his followers who didn't fall away imitated his example, converting to Islam but practicing Judaism in secret. They found Biblical passages which they interpreted as prophecies of Sabbatai's apostasy, just as Christians did for Jesus' death and resurrection.)

It’s no accident that the two principal icons of the Catholic Church, and of much of the rest of Christianity, are on the one hand, a nearly naked man in agony and ecstasy eternally dying on a cross, and on the other, a virgin mother in a burka.

"No accident" indeed, since Jesus was probably crucified (it's not the sort of thing that Christians would have made up, it was too shameful, like, say, dying of AIDS would be now), not killed by firing squad or a bow and arrow. Icons of divine mothers are cross-culturally popular, and it's widely believed that the cult of Mary descends from the cult of Isis/Ishtar. But what does this "no accident" mean? HS obviously think it has some sinister significance, but doesn't say what, except that he thinks it should be "the empty tomb plated in gold and hanging around the necks of believers", instead of a cross. I'm surprised that Calvary Tabernacle dwelt on the Passion so much on Sunday instead of Good Friday, when such things usually are done. Easter, judging by what I hear from Christians I know, means sunrise services in commemoration of the gospels' discovery of the empty tomb at dawn.

Well, there's no reason non-theists should be any better informed about Christianity than Christians are. But we can't claim to be more rational, or wiser, or more realistic about the world than the religious if we aren't better informed. Homo Superior complains about the passion play he witnessed:

Rather than being edified, I was embarrassed. I felt like my nose was being rubbed in the private, fucked up, quasi-sexual, sado-maschochistic fantasies of a cult; and they were using it to try to indoctrinate me.

Why would anyone be "indoctrinated" by this spectacle? Wouldn't an outsider -- a genuine outsider, I mean, not a lapsed Christian -- simply be repelled by it? (This complaint reminds me of antihomosexual Christians who raise the alarm about how homosexuals are trying to recruit ("indoctrinate") outsiders with our disgusting sexual practices and our leather daddies, which I would think an odd way to entice potential converts. For all that Pentecostals are eager to make recruits, I'd take that performance as something for the already converted. (Much like the "Hunky Jesus" contest: it wasn't supposed to win bigots over, or to counter bigots' stereotypes about gays -- it was an event for the already "converted.")

For that matter, what's wrong with "sado-masochistic fantasies"? Again, they play a role in religion because they play a role in many people's lives; they play a highly visible role in gay male sexual iconography, however little they interest me. When antigay Christians fulminate about the disgusting aspects of gay life, we tend to suspect that covertly they find those aspects attractive, even exciting; I have similar suspicions about Homo Superior's (and other nonbelievers') fixation on the Passion drama -- and about Andrew Sullivan's outrage at the Hunky Jesus contest.

His Eye Is on the Cruise Missile

Glenn Greenwald, who's been posing some good questions about Obama's Libya speech as a revelation of his (that is, Obama's) belief in American exceptionalism, linked today to a recent post by Andrew Sullivan, calling it "long and thoughtful." Well, he was half-right. It's about as thoughtful as most of Sullivan's writing, which is not very.

Sullivan is sure that the US-led attack on Libya is a good thing:

In this, especially with this Libya clusterfuck, Obama reverted to embracing the forces he was elected to resist and restrain. One appreciates the difficulty of this and the horrible moral dilemma of Benghazi; and I still hope for success - because I see no sane alternative to Obama anywhere and no one can hope that the monster Qaddafi stays in power.

"The monster Qaddafi." Well, yes, Qaddafi is a very bad man. That's been well-known for a long time, which raises the question of why the US, England, and other European countries decided to rehabilitate him. That began during the Bush administration, but did the Obama administration do anything to stop it? Before now, I mean? Nope: several people have pointed out John McCain's junket to Libya in 2009, which McCain himself has conveniently forgotten:

In August 2009 he led a delegation of senators, including fellow hawks Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, on a trip to visit the Libyan leader in Tripoli. Discussed during the visit was delivery of — get this — American military equipment to Gadhafi (a man with American blood on his hands no less).

“We discussed the possibility of moving ahead with the provision of non-lethal defense equipment to the government of Libya,” the AP quoted McCain as saying at a press conference. McCain also noted that “ties between the United States and Libya have taken a remarkable and positive turn in recent years.”

One can also ask whether firing cruise missiles into Libya is the best or only way to protect civilians. And have you heard that Secretary of State Clinton told Congress that Obama would ignore any Congressional war resolutions restraining US military action in Libya as "an unconstitutional encroachment on executive power"? Well, now you have.

But back to Sullivan and American exceptionalism. First he admits:

But, of course, that [i.e., this] land mass was available so easily because of the intended and unintended genocide of those who already lived there - which takes the edge off the divine bit, don't you think? Call me crazy (and they do) but my concept of God does not allow for God's blessing of genocide as a means for one country's hegemony over the earth.

I'm not going to call him crazy, just ignorant. The Roman Catholic Sullivan's concept of God doesn't square with Biblical conceptions, which show "God's blessing of genocide" in the conquest of the Promised Land by his Chosen People. And "that land mass" became available to the US not only through the elimination of the indigenous people, but through conquest of other countries established by rival European powers, especially Spain. Much of the southwestern US was simply taken from Mexico by war.

He goes on (and on):

This is not to say that America doesn't remain, by virtue of its astonishing Constitution, a unique sanctuary for human freedom. We are freer here in terms of speech than in most other advanced countries, cowed by p.c. laws and restrictions. We are freer here in labor and capital than most other countries. To feel pride in this is natural. It is why I love this place and yearn to be one of its citizens. And the vast wealth of an entire continent, unleashed by freedom's flourishing, gave this land of liberty real and awesome global power, which it used to vanquish the two great evils of the last century - Nazism and Communism. This is the noble legacy so many now seek to perpetuate, with good intentions and benign hearts, despite the disastrous and costly interventions of the last decade.

"The vast wealth of an entire continent" was not "unleashed by freedom's flourishing" -- as Sullivan admits, it was unleashed by stealing it from the people who lived there before. The history of American capitalism isn't pretty, and it's ill-timed of Sullivan to prattle about US "freedom in labor and capital" on the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and as anti-labor forces are rampant. Even granting that World War II was "noble", and not everyone would, it was the exception rather than the rule. Before that war, the US had a nasty record in the Western hemisphere and elsewhere. After the war, the US usually fought Communism by stomping on liberty, replacing elected governments with brutal dictatorships, which our propaganda called "the Free World." Even where the repression we supported was not quite as harsh, we demanded economic policies that took a heavy toll in human life and health.

But Sullivan has always been patriotically ill-informed, like so much of the Right, and ready to vilify anyone else who criticizes US foreign policy. He can bitch about Sarah Palin all he wants, but he helped pave the way for her, Michelle Bachmann, and other professional ignoramuses.

His Eye Is on the Cruise Missile

Glenn Greenwald, who's been posing some good questions about Obama's Libya speech as a revelation of his (that is, Obama's) belief in American exceptionalism, linked today to a recent post by Andrew Sullivan, calling it "long and thoughtful." Well, he was half-right. It's about as thoughtful as most of Sullivan's writing, which is not very.

Sullivan is sure that the US-led attack on Libya is a good thing:

In this, especially with this Libya clusterfuck, Obama reverted to embracing the forces he was elected to resist and restrain. One appreciates the difficulty of this and the horrible moral dilemma of Benghazi; and I still hope for success - because I see no sane alternative to Obama anywhere and no one can hope that the monster Qaddafi stays in power.

"The monster Qaddafi." Well, yes, Qaddafi is a very bad man. That's been well-known for a long time, which raises the question of why the US, England, and other European countries decided to rehabilitate him. That began during the Bush administration, but did the Obama administration do anything to stop it? Before now, I mean? Nope: several people have pointed out John McCain's junket to Libya in 2009, which McCain himself has conveniently forgotten:

In August 2009 he led a delegation of senators, including fellow hawks Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, on a trip to visit the Libyan leader in Tripoli. Discussed during the visit was delivery of — get this — American military equipment to Gadhafi (a man with American blood on his hands no less).

“We discussed the possibility of moving ahead with the provision of non-lethal defense equipment to the government of Libya,” the AP quoted McCain as saying at a press conference. McCain also noted that “ties between the United States and Libya have taken a remarkable and positive turn in recent years.”

One can also ask whether firing cruise missiles into Libya is the best or only way to protect civilians. And have you heard that Secretary of State Clinton told Congress that Obama would ignore any Congressional war resolutions restraining US military action in Libya as "an unconstitutional encroachment on executive power"? Well, now you have.

But back to Sullivan and American exceptionalism. First he admits:

But, of course, that [i.e., this] land mass was available so easily because of the intended and unintended genocide of those who already lived there - which takes the edge off the divine bit, don't you think? Call me crazy (and they do) but my concept of God does not allow for God's blessing of genocide as a means for one country's hegemony over the earth.

I'm not going to call him crazy, just ignorant. The Roman Catholic Sullivan's concept of God doesn't square with Biblical conceptions, which show "God's blessing of genocide" in the conquest of the Promised Land by his Chosen People. And "that land mass" became available to the US not only through the elimination of the indigenous people, but through conquest of other countries established by rival European powers, especially Spain. Much of the southwestern US was simply taken from Mexico by war.

He goes on (and on):

This is not to say that America doesn't remain, by virtue of its astonishing Constitution, a unique sanctuary for human freedom. We are freer here in terms of speech than in most other advanced countries, cowed by p.c. laws and restrictions. We are freer here in labor and capital than most other countries. To feel pride in this is natural. It is why I love this place and yearn to be one of its citizens. And the vast wealth of an entire continent, unleashed by freedom's flourishing, gave this land of liberty real and awesome global power, which it used to vanquish the two great evils of the last century - Nazism and Communism. This is the noble legacy so many now seek to perpetuate, with good intentions and benign hearts, despite the disastrous and costly interventions of the last decade.

"The vast wealth of an entire continent" was not "unleashed by freedom's flourishing" -- as Sullivan admits, it was unleashed by stealing it from the people who lived there before. The history of American capitalism isn't pretty, and it's ill-timed of Sullivan to prattle about US "freedom in labor and capital" on the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and as anti-labor forces are rampant. Even granting that World War II was "noble", and not everyone would, it was the exception rather than the rule. Before that war, the US had a nasty record in the Western hemisphere and elsewhere. After the war, the US usually fought Communism by stomping on liberty, replacing elected governments with brutal dictatorships, which our propaganda called "the Free World." Even where the repression we supported was not quite as harsh, we demanded economic policies that took a heavy toll in human life and health.

But Sullivan has always been patriotically ill-informed, like so much of the Right, and ready to vilify anyone else who criticizes US foreign policy. He can bitch about Sarah Palin all he wants, but he helped pave the way for her, Michelle Bachmann, and other professional ignoramuses.

You Can't Sow a Million Seeds Without Reaping One Potato ...

... And even Andrew Sullivan makes sense now and then. He posted this blistering rejoinder to Juan Williams's vicious remarks on FOX:

"Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous," - Juan Williams.

No, Juan, what you just described is the working definition of bigotry.

What if someone said that they saw a black man walking down the street in classic thug get-up. Would a white person be a bigot of he assumed he was going to mug him? What percentage of traditionally garbed Muslims - I assume wearing a covered veil or some other indicator and being of darker skin - have committed acts of terror? And, of course, the 9/11 mass-murderers were in everyday attire, to blend in. So was the Christmas Day undie-bomber. The Fort Hood murderer was in US military uniform, for Pete's sake.

The literal defense of anti-Muslim bigotry on Fox is becoming endemic. It's disgusting.

Glenn Greenwald also weighed in. Like Greenwald, I don't think Williams should have been fired by NPR for saying these things -- NPR has its own blind spots on the Middle East after all. I just think he should be shunned for life by all decent human beings. Or as Tom Carson once wrote in another context, someone should hire a mimic to follow him around and say "You're dethspicable" in the voice of Daffy Duck every time he opens his mouth.

You Can't Sow a Million Seeds Without Reaping One Potato ...

... And even Andrew Sullivan makes sense now and then. He posted this blistering rejoinder to Juan Williams's vicious remarks on FOX:

"Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous," - Juan Williams.

No, Juan, what you just described is the working definition of bigotry.

What if someone said that they saw a black man walking down the street in classic thug get-up. Would a white person be a bigot of he assumed he was going to mug him? What percentage of traditionally garbed Muslims - I assume wearing a covered veil or some other indicator and being of darker skin - have committed acts of terror? And, of course, the 9/11 mass-murderers were in everyday attire, to blend in. So was the Christmas Day undie-bomber. The Fort Hood murderer was in US military uniform, for Pete's sake.

The literal defense of anti-Muslim bigotry on Fox is becoming endemic. It's disgusting.

Glenn Greenwald also weighed in. Like Greenwald, I don't think Williams should have been fired by NPR for saying these things -- NPR has its own blind spots on the Middle East after all. I just think he should be shunned for life by all decent human beings. Or as Tom Carson once wrote in another context, someone should hire a mimic to follow him around and say "You're dethspicable" in the voice of Daffy Duck every time he opens his mouth.

Concentrate on the Future, Not the Past

It's Gay Pride Day, the forty-first anniversary of the beginning of the Stonewall Riots, and I've been reading parts of Philip Gambone's Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). It's a collection of interviews with more than forty GLBTQ+ π Americans, ranging from young-ish to old, male and female and all points between. Unfortunately the interviews are quite short and don't go very deep, though part of the trouble might be that I've been reading the interviews with people I've already heard of, and they don't tell me much that's new. Richard Rodriguez is in there, for example, being as much of an asshole as usual. Gambone reports, "He tells me about the day at Berkeley when an African American student asked him why he was reading a novel by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. 'That's when I realized that I had entered a Dark Age. That I had entered an age when we were not allowed to know each other's literature'" (238).

What? The report is too sketchy for me to tell for sure, but I'd like to know why that "African American student" posed that question. I've sometimes been asked by Koreans why I read Korean literature and watch Korean films, and they're generally satisfied when I tell them that I find these interesting, and why. They ask, not to tell me I'm not allowed to know Korean literature, but because so few Americans (and too few Koreans) are interested in their culture. Even if Rodriguez' interlocutor really meant that non-Africans shouldn't be reading African literature, he was not speaking for the university. Students nowadays are expected to "know each other's literature": Achebe's Things Fall Apart is often assigned reading, and that's why we hear about culture wars, multiculturalism, and "political correctness." If there ever was a "Dark Age," as Rodriguez claims, it's over now. White students study Afro-American Studies (and join the African-American Choral Ensemble), men enroll in Women's Studies, heterosexuals do Queer Theory. The separatism that Rodriguez denounces simply isn't there in the academy.

There's also an interview with Frank Kameny, which further undermines Andrew Sullivan's claims about the history of the gay movement. Kameny tells Gambone that he "wants to watch the coverage of the city's gay pride parade. 'I may well be in it.' Indeed, that afternoon I watched from the sidewalk on P Street as Kameny, one of Capital Pride's 2009 'Super Heroes,' passed by in an open car, waving to the crowd" (171). Far from being ignored, Kameny's role as a founder of the gay rights movement is well known and celebrated, as it has been ever since I can remember.

Kameny told Gambone:

The homophile organizations that existed [in the 1950s and early 1960s] gave enormous credence to the so-called experts and authorities of the day. They weren't really militant. That wasn't me or my style... [171]

Kameny's "confrontational style became known as 'ferocious'", Gambone says. The radical gay movement of the 70s took that style and ran with it. Kameny's personal goals were what would be called assimilationist, since they involved gays serving in the Civil Service and military, and running for public office, but he also rejected the mainstream view of homosexuality as a sickness. Kameny joined the gay militants who took on the psychiatric profession -- again, far from being hostile to the post-Stonewall movement, he worked with it.

Kameny contends that these early demonstrations -- and the annual Fourth of July pickets in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, which Mattachine Washington joined -- paved the way for the Stonewall uprising in 1969. "By virtue of our coming out of the closet collectively, it created the mindset for protesting, so that when the events of the moment created the eruption on Christopher Street, people were primed" [175].

Sure, there was tension between left gay radicals and those whose politics fell into the American mainstream, but that is only to be expected. Kameny rejected the collaborationist approach of the homophile movement of the 1950s, and that was too much for much of the movement. As Kay Lahusen of Daughters of Bilitis told Eric Marcus, "We had one of our major contributors write to us in a private letter that only dirty, unwashed rabble did this kind of thing" (Making History, HarperCollins, 1992, p. 125) -- "this kind of thing" being picketing.

But of course, the new wave frequently tries to put the last wave out of business. Certainly, we had our differences with Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon at DOB [Daughters of Bilitis]. We had said to them, "You're over the hill. Your thinking is out of date." So GLF did the same to us.

Barbara [Gittings, Lahusen's partner] We didn't do that in a public setting.

Kay: But we took their magazine in a totally different direction, and they weren't happy with that. We thumbed our noses at them -- almost [Making History, 215].

I realize that to some extent Andrew Sullivan is doing the same thing. The difference, and it's a serious one, is that he still chooses to distort the history of the movement that came before him. There's no excuse for that in a day when that history is so widely and easily available; if he doesn't know it, it's because he doesn't want to.

Concentrate on the Future, Not the Past

It's Gay Pride Day, the forty-first anniversary of the beginning of the Stonewall Riots, and I've been reading parts of Philip Gambone's Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). It's a collection of interviews with more than forty GLBTQ+ π Americans, ranging from young-ish to old, male and female and all points between. Unfortunately the interviews are quite short and don't go very deep, though part of the trouble might be that I've been reading the interviews with people I've already heard of, and they don't tell me much that's new. Richard Rodriguez is in there, for example, being as much of an asshole as usual. Gambone reports, "He tells me about the day at Berkeley when an African American student asked him why he was reading a novel by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. 'That's when I realized that I had entered a Dark Age. That I had entered an age when we were not allowed to know each other's literature'" (238).

What? The report is too sketchy for me to tell for sure, but I'd like to know why that "African American student" posed that question. I've sometimes been asked by Koreans why I read Korean literature and watch Korean films, and they're generally satisfied when I tell them that I find these interesting, and why. They ask, not to tell me I'm not allowed to know Korean literature, but because so few Americans (and too few Koreans) are interested in their culture. Even if Rodriguez' interlocutor really meant that non-Africans shouldn't be reading African literature, he was not speaking for the university. Students nowadays are expected to "know each other's literature": Achebe's Things Fall Apart is often assigned reading, and that's why we hear about culture wars, multiculturalism, and "political correctness." If there ever was a "Dark Age," as Rodriguez claims, it's over now. White students study Afro-American Studies (and join the African-American Choral Ensemble), men enroll in Women's Studies, heterosexuals do Queer Theory. The separatism that Rodriguez denounces simply isn't there in the academy.

There's also an interview with Frank Kameny, which further undermines Andrew Sullivan's claims about the history of the gay movement. Kameny tells Gambone that he "wants to watch the coverage of the city's gay pride parade. 'I may well be in it.' Indeed, that afternoon I watched from the sidewalk on P Street as Kameny, one of Capital Pride's 2009 'Super Heroes,' passed by in an open car, waving to the crowd" (171). Far from being ignored, Kameny's role as a founder of the gay rights movement is well known and celebrated, as it has been ever since I can remember.

Kameny told Gambone:

The homophile organizations that existed [in the 1950s and early 1960s] gave enormous credence to the so-called experts and authorities of the day. They weren't really militant. That wasn't me or my style... [171]

Kameny's "confrontational style became known as 'ferocious'", Gambone says. The radical gay movement of the 70s took that style and ran with it. Kameny's personal goals were what would be called assimilationist, since they involved gays serving in the Civil Service and military, and running for public office, but he also rejected the mainstream view of homosexuality as a sickness. Kameny joined the gay militants who took on the psychiatric profession -- again, far from being hostile to the post-Stonewall movement, he worked with it.

Kameny contends that these early demonstrations -- and the annual Fourth of July pickets in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, which Mattachine Washington joined -- paved the way for the Stonewall uprising in 1969. "By virtue of our coming out of the closet collectively, it created the mindset for protesting, so that when the events of the moment created the eruption on Christopher Street, people were primed" [175].

Sure, there was tension between left gay radicals and those whose politics fell into the American mainstream, but that is only to be expected. Kameny rejected the collaborationist approach of the homophile movement of the 1950s, and that was too much for much of the movement. As Kay Lahusen of Daughters of Bilitis told Eric Marcus, "We had one of our major contributors write to us in a private letter that only dirty, unwashed rabble did this kind of thing" (Making History, HarperCollins, 1992, p. 125) -- "this kind of thing" being picketing.

But of course, the new wave frequently tries to put the last wave out of business. Certainly, we had our differences with Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon at DOB [Daughters of Bilitis]. We had said to them, "You're over the hill. Your thinking is out of date." So GLF did the same to us.

Barbara [Gittings, Lahusen's partner] We didn't do that in a public setting.

Kay: But we took their magazine in a totally different direction, and they weren't happy with that. We thumbed our noses at them -- almost [Making History, 215].

I realize that to some extent Andrew Sullivan is doing the same thing. The difference, and it's a serious one, is that he still chooses to distort the history of the movement that came before him. There's no excuse for that in a day when that history is so widely and easily available; if he doesn't know it, it's because he doesn't want to.

Social Justice for Me, But Not for Thee

Once again Andrew Sullivan demonstrates his aggressive fondness for disinformation. As he advances toward his 50th birthday, that becomes less and less excusable because of his youth.

In a June 16 post Sullivan writes:

The salience of the drag queen revolt in the West Village in June 1969 is not in any historical dispute. It was a cultural and psychological breakthrough - an empowering moment that clearly shifted something deep in gay America's psyche. But the notion that before this, there was no gay rights movement, that those amazing drag queens were the first gay Americans ever to stand up for their rights in public, is as preposterous as it is now deemed indisputable. Take this quote from Eric Marcus in the NYT today:

“Before Stonewall there was no such thing as coming out or being out,” says Eric Marcus, the author of “Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian & Gay Equal Rights.” “People talk about being in and out now; there was no out, there was just in.”

Has Eric Marcus heard of Frank Kameny? Many Dish readers have....

Why yes, Eric Marcus has heard of Frank Kameny. His oral history of the gay movement, Making Gay History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights 1945-1990 (HarperCollins, 1992), mentioned in that Times quotation, includes a lengthy interview he did with Kameny. Kameny told Marcus, "I was not open about being gay at that time -- no one was, not in 1957. But I was certainly leading a social life. I went to the gay bars many, many evenings. I've never been a covert kind of a person, and I wasn't about to be someone simply because I was working for the government" (94). He also said:

First of all, up to this time, homosexuality had never been publicly discussed. ... Virtually from one end of the decade to the other, outside the medical books, there was nothing anywhere on the subject. It was blanked out, blacked out. It wasn't there! ... And so the movement, predictably, in retrospect, did not take strong positions. It gave a hearing to everybody, saying, "As long as it deals with homosexuality, all views must be heard, even those that are the most harshly and viciously condemnatory to homosexuals. We have to defer to the experts." My answer to that was, "Drivel! We are the experts on ourselves, and we will tell the experts they have nothing to tell us" (97-98).

Kameny somewhat overstated his case there. There had been public discussion of homosexuality before he was radicalized. The Kinsey Reports (1948, 1953) had led to some public discussion of homosexuality, but gay voices didn't participate in it, partly because the media would not have permitted them to do so, and almost no gays would have done so openly if they had. The closest to such a gay contribution was Donald Webster Cory's The Homosexual in America (originally published in 1951), but Cory was also a pseudonym. By Sullivan's standards, Kameny himself would have been saying that there was no gay rights movement before Stonewall. And Kameny's attitude did not define the movement in those days -- it put him at odds with it.

Of course, what Marcus said to the Times in no way claims that there was no gay rights movement in America before Stonewall: he was talking about being out, being openly gay. While a few people were out in that way before the Stonewall riots of June 1969, it was not characteristic of the movement. Kameny was, if memory serves, one of the few activists in the pre-Stonewall era who didn't use a pseudonym in their movement work. Sullivan concedes that "There was 'out' before Stonewall. It was a different kind of out. But I'd argue that the courage of a civil servant in a suit and tie marching outside the White House in 1963 deserves just as much respect and focus as Village bar patrons six years later." True, but who said it didn't? Kameny was widely known as an important pioneer and respected (though there were of course dissenters) by younger activists when I came out in 1971, included in movement writing about the history of the gay movement, and the IU gay organization invited him to speak at its Midwestern Conference in the mid-1970s.

Typically, Sullivan refers to the Stonewall riots as a "drag queen revolt." In a follow-up post he admits that it wasn't: "It's also worth noting that many of those who fought back that night were not drag queens, but just regular homos who had had enough." "Regular homos"! In Sullivan's world there's no middle ground between "regular homos" (presumably white men like himself) and drag queens. He repeats his core falsehood: "My point was to push back against the idiotic - and politically loaded - notion that the gay rights movement began with Stonewall." No one that I know of, certainly in the gay movement, has ever said that it did. Sullivan's Exhibit A is the quotation from Eric Marcus that says something quite different, so I presume he has no real evidence to support his claim. He points to gay rightist Bruce Bawer's notorious essay "The Stonewall Myth," which makes the same false claim about the same straw men, and was demolished nicely (along with an early article on the subject by Sullivan) by Tony Kushner in his 1994 article "A Socialism of the Skin." (All but the last three pages of Kushner's article is available at that link. The Nation, where it first appeared, doesn't have it online. Shame on them.)

And the concerted attempt to erase the history of this older, more centrist (and therefore more radical) gay politics is itself a political move - to co-opt the gay rights movement for the New Left, rather than seeing it as a much more complex and diverse movement, that often used radicalism and revolt, but also deployed argument and logic in the long and winding road to equal dignity. In fact, this fusion of proud and openly gay engagement with American society with sporadic revolt against it has been the key to the movement's astonishingly swift success.

Sullivan's hobbyhorse, which goes back to the beginning of his career as a gay writer, is that "the gay rights movement" has been hijacked by the Left. This politically loaded claim is about forty years out of date: the US gay movement was dominated by the left for a very brief period right after Stonewall, and almost immediately abandoned Gay Liberation for a single-issue focus. Many New York activists left GLF to form Gay Activists Alliance within a year, and for most of the decades since, the movement has been dominated by "centrists" and assimilationists.

Those people are still too far left for Sullivan, though; that's his complaint. But it's Sullivan, not those forever unnamed gay leftists, who is trying to "erase the history" of the US gay movement; his picture is not only at odds with the history but even with the account of his own personal friend Frank Kameny. The Gay Liberationists also "deployed argument and logic in the long and winding road to equal dignity"; it's the gay Right that has relied mostly on ad hominems and fantasy. (And pseudonyms -- the leadership of the Log Cabin Republicans were still using fake names into the late 80s at least -- from fear of retaliation not from the Gay Left, but from members of their own party.) Sullivan's history of reaching out to the most bigoted elements of the Right is a sign not merely of naivete but a studied refusal to learn from experience. He's constantly shocked! shocked! to discover that so many conservatives, from the Pope on down, are hardline bigots; he continues to blame their bigotry on the "politics of performance art," and can't understand why they won't accept a nice Catholic boy like him as the true face of the gay movement, power glutes and all.

Social Justice for Me, But Not for Thee

Once again Andrew Sullivan demonstrates his aggressive fondness for disinformation. As he advances toward his 50th birthday, that becomes less and less excusable because of his youth.

In a June 16 post Sullivan writes:

The salience of the drag queen revolt in the West Village in June 1969 is not in any historical dispute. It was a cultural and psychological breakthrough - an empowering moment that clearly shifted something deep in gay America's psyche. But the notion that before this, there was no gay rights movement, that those amazing drag queens were the first gay Americans ever to stand up for their rights in public, is as preposterous as it is now deemed indisputable. Take this quote from Eric Marcus in the NYT today:

“Before Stonewall there was no such thing as coming out or being out,” says Eric Marcus, the author of “Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian & Gay Equal Rights.” “People talk about being in and out now; there was no out, there was just in.”

Has Eric Marcus heard of Frank Kameny? Many Dish readers have....

Why yes, Eric Marcus has heard of Frank Kameny. His oral history of the gay movement, Making Gay History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights 1945-1990 (HarperCollins, 1992), mentioned in that Times quotation, includes a lengthy interview he did with Kameny. Kameny told Marcus, "I was not open about being gay at that time -- no one was, not in 1957. But I was certainly leading a social life. I went to the gay bars many, many evenings. I've never been a covert kind of a person, and I wasn't about to be someone simply because I was working for the government" (94). He also said:

First of all, up to this time, homosexuality had never been publicly discussed. ... Virtually from one end of the decade to the other, outside the medical books, there was nothing anywhere on the subject. It was blanked out, blacked out. It wasn't there! ... And so the movement, predictably, in retrospect, did not take strong positions. It gave a hearing to everybody, saying, "As long as it deals with homosexuality, all views must be heard, even those that are the most harshly and viciously condemnatory to homosexuals. We have to defer to the experts." My answer to that was, "Drivel! We are the experts on ourselves, and we will tell the experts they have nothing to tell us" (97-98).

Kameny somewhat overstated his case there. There had been public discussion of homosexuality before he was radicalized. The Kinsey Reports (1948, 1953) had led to some public discussion of homosexuality, but gay voices didn't participate in it, partly because the media would not have permitted them to do so, and almost no gays would have done so openly if they had. The closest to such a gay contribution was Donald Webster Cory's The Homosexual in America (originally published in 1951), but Cory was also a pseudonym. By Sullivan's standards, Kameny himself would have been saying that there was no gay rights movement before Stonewall. And Kameny's attitude did not define the movement in those days -- it put him at odds with it.

Of course, what Marcus said to the Times in no way claims that there was no gay rights movement in America before Stonewall: he was talking about being out, being openly gay. While a few people were out in that way before the Stonewall riots of June 1969, it was not characteristic of the movement. Kameny was, if memory serves, one of the few activists in the pre-Stonewall era who didn't use a pseudonym in their movement work. Sullivan concedes that "There was 'out' before Stonewall. It was a different kind of out. But I'd argue that the courage of a civil servant in a suit and tie marching outside the White House in 1963 deserves just as much respect and focus as Village bar patrons six years later." True, but who said it didn't? Kameny was widely known as an important pioneer and respected (though there were of course dissenters) by younger activists when I came out in 1971, included in movement writing about the history of the gay movement, and the IU gay organization invited him to speak at its Midwestern Conference in the mid-1970s.

Typically, Sullivan refers to the Stonewall riots as a "drag queen revolt." In a follow-up post he admits that it wasn't: "It's also worth noting that many of those who fought back that night were not drag queens, but just regular homos who had had enough." "Regular homos"! In Sullivan's world there's no middle ground between "regular homos" (presumably white men like himself) and drag queens. He repeats his core falsehood: "My point was to push back against the idiotic - and politically loaded - notion that the gay rights movement began with Stonewall." No one that I know of, certainly in the gay movement, has ever said that it did. Sullivan's Exhibit A is the quotation from Eric Marcus that says something quite different, so I presume he has no real evidence to support his claim. He points to gay rightist Bruce Bawer's notorious essay "The Stonewall Myth," which makes the same false claim about the same straw men, and was demolished nicely (along with an early article on the subject by Sullivan) by Tony Kushner in his 1994 article "A Socialism of the Skin." (All but the last three pages of Kushner's article is available at that link. The Nation, where it first appeared, doesn't have it online. Shame on them.)

And the concerted attempt to erase the history of this older, more centrist (and therefore more radical) gay politics is itself a political move - to co-opt the gay rights movement for the New Left, rather than seeing it as a much more complex and diverse movement, that often used radicalism and revolt, but also deployed argument and logic in the long and winding road to equal dignity. In fact, this fusion of proud and openly gay engagement with American society with sporadic revolt against it has been the key to the movement's astonishingly swift success.

Sullivan's hobbyhorse, which goes back to the beginning of his career as a gay writer, is that "the gay rights movement" has been hijacked by the Left. This politically loaded claim is about forty years out of date: the US gay movement was dominated by the left for a very brief period right after Stonewall, and almost immediately abandoned Gay Liberation for a single-issue focus. Many New York activists left GLF to form Gay Activists Alliance within a year, and for most of the decades since, the movement has been dominated by "centrists" and assimilationists.

Those people are still too far left for Sullivan, though; that's his complaint. But it's Sullivan, not those forever unnamed gay leftists, who is trying to "erase the history" of the US gay movement; his picture is not only at odds with the history but even with the account of his own personal friend Frank Kameny. The Gay Liberationists also "deployed argument and logic in the long and winding road to equal dignity"; it's the gay Right that has relied mostly on ad hominems and fantasy. (And pseudonyms -- the leadership of the Log Cabin Republicans were still using fake names into the late 80s at least -- from fear of retaliation not from the Gay Left, but from members of their own party.) Sullivan's history of reaching out to the most bigoted elements of the Right is a sign not merely of naivete but a studied refusal to learn from experience. He's constantly shocked! shocked! to discover that so many conservatives, from the Pope on down, are hardline bigots; he continues to blame their bigotry on the "politics of performance art," and can't understand why they won't accept a nice Catholic boy like him as the true face of the gay movement, power glutes and all.

Travel / Posting Advisory and Eternal Life

I'll be leaving for Korea on Friday morning, so things are going to be hectic until after the weekend. Hell, they're hectic now, and I should be at home getting ready instead of sitting here in the Pourhouse typing. But that's procrastination!

Meanwhile, I found this at Homo Superior, and the link indicated that it had come from Andrew Sullivan.

The Christian notion of eternal life just doesn’t make any sense to me. I can’t conceive of how I could be “me” without the context of the world I live in, the relationships I have, and my time and place. That would be some other person. To be an ego without a world is to be nothing. I think when you have a better understanding that our existence as personalities in this world is already ephemeral, even while we are alive, it makes regret for our disappearance seem peculiar.

As Rilke says, we are “transpositions of air”.

That couldn't be the Catholic-American Sullivan, I thought. When I clicked through, it turned out I was right: he was quoting a letter from a reader. It's quite good stuff. All I can add is Wittgenstein's Tractatus (6.3412), "[I]s some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?"

Travel / Posting Advisory and Eternal Life

I'll be leaving for Korea on Friday morning, so things are going to be hectic until after the weekend. Hell, they're hectic now, and I should be at home getting ready instead of sitting here in the Pourhouse typing. But that's procrastination!

Meanwhile, I found this at Homo Superior, and the link indicated that it had come from Andrew Sullivan.

The Christian notion of eternal life just doesn’t make any sense to me. I can’t conceive of how I could be “me” without the context of the world I live in, the relationships I have, and my time and place. That would be some other person. To be an ego without a world is to be nothing. I think when you have a better understanding that our existence as personalities in this world is already ephemeral, even while we are alive, it makes regret for our disappearance seem peculiar.

As Rilke says, we are “transpositions of air”.

That couldn't be the Catholic-American Sullivan, I thought. When I clicked through, it turned out I was right: he was quoting a letter from a reader. It's quite good stuff. All I can add is Wittgenstein's Tractatus (6.3412), "[I]s some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?"

Moral Relativism for Professionals

Andrew Sullivan muses on the current abuse scandals troubling Holy Church:

It's very odd - and deeply revealing - to see theocons dancing with moral relativism and cultural context on the issue of child abuse.

What's so odd about it? Theological conservatives have always used moral relativism when it suited their purposes, and as Sullivan has also acknowledged (via), the sexual abuse of children has been covered up for a very long time, not by liberals but by the conservatives who run the institutions. And I won't do more than mention physical abuse of children -- beatings, overwork, starvation, et cetera -- which is a tradition of great antiquity.

Up through the period when Meibom composed his De Flagorum Usu, flogging was the standard method in Europe of punishing unruly children. In early modern England, both in homes and schools, across the boundaries of social class, the birch rod - as administered by parents, servants, nurses, tutors, or teachers - became the conventional instrument of retribution. Both boys and girls were expected to be unremittingly deferential to their elders and were beaten routinely for a great range of offenses: disobedience, obstinacy, laziness, a missed stitch, a flubbed Latin conjugation. And the punishments varied enormously in severity, from a gentle hand slap to prolonged, violent whippings that sometimes resulted in the death of the child. For the determined castigator, the child’s hand, mouth, face, and buttocks (either naked or clothed) were fair game. In addition to the birch rod, a ferula - a wooden slat with a large rounded end and a hole in its middle - could be used to raise a large and painful blister. Lawrence Stone notes that in the grammar schools (which drew a far greater number of boys than they had during the late Middle Ages) the standard method of administering the rod required one active and two passive participants: a boy would be beaten “with a birch” by his master “on the naked buttocks while bent over and horsed on the back of another boy.” Even in universities, young men were regularly submitted to public whippings, floggings over a barrel, or detention in the stocks. ...

(David Savran, Taking it like a man: white masculinity, masochism, and contemporary American culture. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 17-18.)

Moral Relativism for Professionals

Andrew Sullivan muses on the current abuse scandals troubling Holy Church:

It's very odd - and deeply revealing - to see theocons dancing with moral relativism and cultural context on the issue of child abuse.

What's so odd about it? Theological conservatives have always used moral relativism when it suited their purposes, and as Sullivan has also acknowledged (via), the sexual abuse of children has been covered up for a very long time, not by liberals but by the conservatives who run the institutions. And I won't do more than mention physical abuse of children -- beatings, overwork, starvation, et cetera -- which is a tradition of great antiquity.

Up through the period when Meibom composed his De Flagorum Usu, flogging was the standard method in Europe of punishing unruly children. In early modern England, both in homes and schools, across the boundaries of social class, the birch rod - as administered by parents, servants, nurses, tutors, or teachers - became the conventional instrument of retribution. Both boys and girls were expected to be unremittingly deferential to their elders and were beaten routinely for a great range of offenses: disobedience, obstinacy, laziness, a missed stitch, a flubbed Latin conjugation. And the punishments varied enormously in severity, from a gentle hand slap to prolonged, violent whippings that sometimes resulted in the death of the child. For the determined castigator, the child’s hand, mouth, face, and buttocks (either naked or clothed) were fair game. In addition to the birch rod, a ferula - a wooden slat with a large rounded end and a hole in its middle - could be used to raise a large and painful blister. Lawrence Stone notes that in the grammar schools (which drew a far greater number of boys than they had during the late Middle Ages) the standard method of administering the rod required one active and two passive participants: a boy would be beaten “with a birch” by his master “on the naked buttocks while bent over and horsed on the back of another boy.” Even in universities, young men were regularly submitted to public whippings, floggings over a barrel, or detention in the stocks. ...

(David Savran, Taking it like a man: white masculinity, masochism, and contemporary American culture. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 17-18.)

Sullivan's Drivels

Homo Superior has changed his format, but he's still linking to Andrew Sullivan, who's been complaining about the current state of the Right.

Once upon a time, the intellectual conservatives in this country cherished their dissidents, encouraged argument, embraced the quirky, valued the eccentric and mocked the lock-step ideological left. Now they are what they once mocked. And they have the ideological discipline of the old left.

Like HomoSup, I wonder which "intellectual conservatives" Sullivan has in mind, and when this Once Upon a Time golden age could have been. Homo Superior mentions William F. Buckley, who was as much of an intellectual second-rater as ... well, as Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan doesn't know his history very well, particularly of the American Right, but that's hardly news. What I find funny is that Sullivan himself started out as a hard-liner except for his homosexuality, and filled the pages of The New Republic with right-wing mediocrities like himself (remember Ruth Shalit?); he no doubt likes to think of himself as "quirky" if not "eccentric," but he has never been someone you could read for substance. When George W. Bush took the Presidency, Sullivan was exultant, jeering at the anti-corporate leftists who were going to rage impotently under the new dispensation; some years later Sullivan endorsed Barack Obama, which was not really that much of a change.

Not that I have anything against hard-liners; I suppose I'm one myself, though I'm not sure which line I'm hard about. Homo Superior goes on to say:

Having said that, I have had more valuable conversations, ones without judgment or ire, with people like Buckley than I have had with those on the lock-step ideological left, and that includes many, many on the Queer Left.

Like anyone with extreme viewpoints, their definition of dissident is someone who agrees with them.

I realized I didn’t belong in the left and sometimes call myself a lapsed lefty. I now embrace the descriptor, contrarian.

(The video clip above comes from Noam Chomsky's 1969 appearance on Buckley's PBS program Firing Line. Buckley's offer to "smash you in the goddam face" is a reference to his then-recent offer, made in earnest, to do the same to Gore Vidal. Here it's supposed to be a joke, though I've never gotten its point. It's the sort of thing that should be borne in mind, though, when Buckley is eulogized. So should Buckley's vacuous debating style.)

Maybe I should embrace "contrarian" myself, but the word has been dirtied more than a little since Christopher Hitchens began touting himself as one. I don't see my own positions are particularly contrary, if I understand the word correctly, which to me implies simply staking an opposing position; I find myself over yonder somewhere. And what happens when two contrarians clash? Do they cancel each other out like matter and anti-matter?

I don't know if I "belong in the left" either, but I do know that most of the thinkers and writers I've learned the most from have been associated with the left, and that left writers and media are those I can reliably look to for accurate information about politics and culture. The few right-wingers with whom I find some common ground are those who are least lock-step themselves, like William Buckley calling for the legalization of drugs (probably the only issue on which I agree with him). On the other hand, I'm not wedded to the word "left", anymore than I am to the words "gay" or "queer."

I'm particularly amused by the notion that the left is lock-step, considering how often people on the left complain about the deep divisions, the sectarian squabbling, that divide our portion of the political spectrum. And while I'm being amused, the use of the word "extreme" as a cussword is always good for a giggle. (I'm reminded of an old joke where a man accusingly asks an uppity woman, "Are you a lesbian?" and she counters, "Are you the alternative?")

I know very well about homophobia on the left, which is detestable and gives me opportunities to express my own hard-line extremism. Harry Hay founded Mattachine after he was expelled from the Communist Party of the USA for being a queer; Black Mountain College, a lefty-liberal experimental college of the 1930s through the 1950s, fired some queer faculty, notably the anarchist writer Paul Goodman, who wrote in a famous essay called "Memoirs of an Ancient Activist",

Frankly, my experience of radical community is that it does not tolerate my freedom. Nevertheless, I am all for community because it is a human thing, only I seem doomed to be left out.

On the other hand, my homosexual acts and the overt claim to the right to commit them have never disadvantaged me much, as far as I know, in more square institutions. I have taught at half a dozen state universities. I am continually invited, often as chief speaker, to conferences of junior high school superintendents, boards of regents, guidance counsellors, task forces on delinquency, etc., etc. I say what I think right, I make passes if there is occasion -- I have even made out, which is more than I can say for conferences of SDS or Resistance. [Len Richmond and Gary Noguera, eds.,The Gay Liberation Book (Ramparts Press, 1973, p. 24]

I especially like that bit about favoring community but always being left out of it, but then I've generally found myself not wanting in to the available communities. I've generally been content to deal with communities through their writings. If I'm marginalized, well, it's a dirty job but someone has to do it, and more often than not it's because I've sidled over to the margins rather than stay close to the people who are at the center or core or mainstream -- whatever you want to call it. ("I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me for a member" -- but there's not a club made up of those of us who identify with that line, either.) I've been a little disappointed to find that I don't necessarily get along with other misfits because being a misfit is not in itself enough to have in common; but that too has been a useful lesson. And despite all this, I've never been a total isolate either. I have something resembling community, and it serves to keep me going.

What to do about American politics, though, I don't know. As an intellectual I have little to say to the Teabaggers, but then anti-intellectualism is endemic to American society, including many intellectuals. Debate is hard, disagreement is generally painful, and most people prefer not to deal with either. Andrew Sullivan has done little to improve things; I've done even less. We're probably doomed.

Sullivan's Drivels

Homo Superior has changed his format, but he's still linking to Andrew Sullivan, who's been complaining about the current state of the Right.

Once upon a time, the intellectual conservatives in this country cherished their dissidents, encouraged argument, embraced the quirky, valued the eccentric and mocked the lock-step ideological left. Now they are what they once mocked. And they have the ideological discipline of the old left.

Like HomoSup, I wonder which "intellectual conservatives" Sullivan has in mind, and when this Once Upon a Time golden age could have been. Homo Superior mentions William F. Buckley, who was as much of an intellectual second-rater as ... well, as Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan doesn't know his history very well, particularly of the American Right, but that's hardly news. What I find funny is that Sullivan himself started out as a hard-liner except for his homosexuality, and filled the pages of The New Republic with right-wing mediocrities like himself (remember Ruth Shalit?); he no doubt likes to think of himself as "quirky" if not "eccentric," but he has never been someone you could read for substance. When George W. Bush took the Presidency, Sullivan was exultant, jeering at the anti-corporate leftists who were going to rage impotently under the new dispensation; some years later Sullivan endorsed Barack Obama, which was not really that much of a change.

Not that I have anything against hard-liners; I suppose I'm one myself, though I'm not sure which line I'm hard about. Homo Superior goes on to say:

Having said that, I have had more valuable conversations, ones without judgment or ire, with people like Buckley than I have had with those on the lock-step ideological left, and that includes many, many on the Queer Left.

Like anyone with extreme viewpoints, their definition of dissident is someone who agrees with them.

I realized I didn’t belong in the left and sometimes call myself a lapsed lefty. I now embrace the descriptor, contrarian.

(The video clip above comes from Noam Chomsky's 1969 appearance on Buckley's PBS program Firing Line. Buckley's offer to "smash you in the goddam face" is a reference to his then-recent offer, made in earnest, to do the same to Gore Vidal. Here it's supposed to be a joke, though I've never gotten its point. It's the sort of thing that should be borne in mind, though, when Buckley is eulogized. So should Buckley's vacuous debating style.)

Maybe I should embrace "contrarian" myself, but the word has been dirtied more than a little since Christopher Hitchens began touting himself as one. I don't see my own positions are particularly contrary, if I understand the word correctly, which to me implies simply staking an opposing position; I find myself over yonder somewhere. And what happens when two contrarians clash? Do they cancel each other out like matter and anti-matter?

I don't know if I "belong in the left" either, but I do know that most of the thinkers and writers I've learned the most from have been associated with the left, and that left writers and media are those I can reliably look to for accurate information about politics and culture. The few right-wingers with whom I find some common ground are those who are least lock-step themselves, like William Buckley calling for the legalization of drugs (probably the only issue on which I agree with him). On the other hand, I'm not wedded to the word "left", anymore than I am to the words "gay" or "queer."

I'm particularly amused by the notion that the left is lock-step, considering how often people on the left complain about the deep divisions, the sectarian squabbling, that divide our portion of the political spectrum. And while I'm being amused, the use of the word "extreme" as a cussword is always good for a giggle. (I'm reminded of an old joke where a man accusingly asks an uppity woman, "Are you a lesbian?" and she counters, "Are you the alternative?")

I know very well about homophobia on the left, which is detestable and gives me opportunities to express my own hard-line extremism. Harry Hay founded Mattachine after he was expelled from the Communist Party of the USA for being a queer; Black Mountain College, a lefty-liberal experimental college of the 1930s through the 1950s, fired some queer faculty, notably the anarchist writer Paul Goodman, who wrote in a famous essay called "Memoirs of an Ancient Activist",

Frankly, my experience of radical community is that it does not tolerate my freedom. Nevertheless, I am all for community because it is a human thing, only I seem doomed to be left out.

On the other hand, my homosexual acts and the overt claim to the right to commit them have never disadvantaged me much, as far as I know, in more square institutions. I have taught at half a dozen state universities. I am continually invited, often as chief speaker, to conferences of junior high school superintendents, boards of regents, guidance counsellors, task forces on delinquency, etc., etc. I say what I think right, I make passes if there is occasion -- I have even made out, which is more than I can say for conferences of SDS or Resistance. [Len Richmond and Gary Noguera, eds.,The Gay Liberation Book (Ramparts Press, 1973, p. 24]

I especially like that bit about favoring community but always being left out of it, but then I've generally found myself not wanting in to the available communities. I've generally been content to deal with communities through their writings. If I'm marginalized, well, it's a dirty job but someone has to do it, and more often than not it's because I've sidled over to the margins rather than stay close to the people who are at the center or core or mainstream -- whatever you want to call it. ("I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me for a member" -- but there's not a club made up of those of us who identify with that line, either.) I've been a little disappointed to find that I don't necessarily get along with other misfits because being a misfit is not in itself enough to have in common; but that too has been a useful lesson. And despite all this, I've never been a total isolate either. I have something resembling community, and it serves to keep me going.

What to do about American politics, though, I don't know. As an intellectual I have little to say to the Teabaggers, but then anti-intellectualism is endemic to American society, including many intellectuals. Debate is hard, disagreement is generally painful, and most people prefer not to deal with either. Andrew Sullivan has done little to improve things; I've done even less. We're probably doomed.

The Cat With Eyes as Large as Saucers

Homo Superior links to this Quote for the Day:

The Republican party right now is largely bonkers. The Democratic party is a lily-livered hackfest of mediocrity. I remain of the view that Obama is the best thing going for this country.

And asks, "Who could argue with this?"

I could ... George ... I could. So could many others. And that's leaving out the succeeding sentences:

But between the insanity on the right and incoherence on the left, he is marooned in a lonely center. Maybe in the long run, this is a better place to be. Right now it is making governance close to impossible, at a moment when we need all hands on deck.

(Tee hee hee, he thinks that the Democratic Party is the left!)

But the thing to remember is that a few short years ago, Sullivan would have said roughly the same things about George W. Bush.

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