God of Biscuits

Democracy has one giant flaw. It’s an inherent flaw, not debatable. If you set up a democracy, this feature comes with it. Can’t have one without the other. Calling it a flaw is just our own interpretation of the deleterious effect of the feature.

The flaw? Scapegoatism. Someone to blame. Always gotta have someone to blame. When did the United States not have someone to blame? That’s what the Cold War was all about. Neither side wanted it to end and so it didn’t. Not until the Republicans put themselves before “king and country” and unleashed their evil overmind from the conservative thinktanks they set up in the early 1960s.

You could argue that Reagan’s timing was such; you could argue that Sarah Palin’s Bridge To Nowhere tactic was nothing more than a warmed-over version of Reagan’s “Wall to Nowhere” tactic of “Mr. Gorbachov, tear down this wall!”, when it was collapsing all on its own. But Reagan was willing to make the people of the USSR suffer, was willing to market subprime pride to the American people—and by subprime pride, I mean that American didn’t need to feel better about itself in 1980 so much as it needed to earn the right to feel better about itself— in order to get his way, in order to plot a Republican ascendancy. The health of the American state be damned.

So maybe Democracy can, after all, exist without a scapegoat?

Well, Soviets out, “Liberals” in.

I“ve heard more than one Republican say he thinks of this country’s population not in terms of conservatives and progressives but in terms of Liberals and Americans. Clearly, those Patriots have their scapegoat: Liberals.

Now, there’s a huge difference between scapegoating and paranoia. Paranoia tends to arise when you’re feeling down at heel, under attack, in an inferior position.

Scapegoating, on the other hand, tends to happen when you have the upper hand. It happens as a means of consolidating the power you have, extending the high you get from victory. It’s the first thing you do when you stop being a loser: you distance yourself from as much of your loser-context as you can, inventorying all your mistakes and albatrossing someone else with them.

In other words, Off with their Heads!

None of us is immune to this. It feels like the blacks are doing this, distancing themselves with the bottom of the totem pole by targeting gays. They hide it under religion, but even they admit to a totem pole in the first place and happily claim that they’re no longer at the bottom of it. The unspoken bit there, of course, is that someone else is.

In what feels like Ancient Times, the Republicans had the Contract Out On With America, and in 2004 Bush had his “Political Capital”. Stupid hubris that was unnecessarily glib and necessarily reckless and narcissistic.

That’s what seems to be happening now in the newly re-energized gay population.

But we just lost, you say.

Yes, the Mormons and the Catholics violated their tax-exempt statuses, and of course violated the ten commandments to get Prop 8 passed, but what they did was wake the proverbial sleeping giant.

Protests in all 50 states. Multiple protests. Everyone energized. News organizations taking notice.

People still energized. Protests still going on. Proactivity everywhere. All this energy focused and funneled.

Focused energy the likes of which haven’t been seen in a very long time—long before, well, the entire campaign. Where was this kind of energy before the fact? It wasn’t.

I’m not embittered about this and I’m not armchair quarterbacking. In fact, it’s the opposite. I’m bringing it up here because this was in fact one of the mistakes: there wasn’t enough energy generated and focused before Election Day.

I know it, we all know it. And now that we’re energized, we can do something about it. And by “it”, I don’t mean the election results, I mean the mistakes, the reasons why we lost the proposition of Prop 8.

Especially the Mistakes.

So now that we’ve got the good, good feeling of being right, of being the doing kind, of having awakened, it’s not time to look back. Looking back means facing that past where we made mistakes.

It’s far too easy to look at what went wrong and start to point fingers. It’s even easier to point fingers at institutions on exactly the same principles that institutions can destroy people: diffusing the guilt by spreading the blame (e.g., “It's just business”).

Why is it so difficult to take our lumps and move on? On the one hand, we always move on, fast or slow, we move on. Everything does. The only constant is change. And Other Aphorisms As Well!

But in our quick-edit MTV world (or, if you’ve seen the latest Bond flick, our flash-edit, Haggis-baggage post-MTV world), you can never move on fast enough. There’s not enough time to wait for time to move you on. Point fingers, lay blame and you’re shiny-new and you“ve become so yesterday!

So look and see what’s going on. Whose fault was it that Prop 8 passed? I spent more than a week winnowing down through muck that I would rather have not gotten dirty with, feeling dirty on behalf of African Americans with respect to Prop 8, ultimately landing on the following scenario: a Californian African American walks into a voting booth and specifically knows how it will benefit him/her personally, specifically, esoterically if/when Obama is elected as POTUS and thus pulls that lever and while still in the mindset of what bounty and electorate can bring, also votes to remove an existing right for a same-sex couple to be married.

It took me days to figure out that that was the single vision-thing that was so upsetting to me. It took me another two days to realize that all the intellectual brute-forcing in the world would never gain me an understanding of what it’s like to be an African American. And contrapositively, any heterosexual African (or other) American voter out there should never have done anything but hedged on what it’s like to be a homosexual and of course ideally have left us to choose to be married or not.

Bygones.

So who are some of teh gayz blaming for life-long religious folks voting against the rights of same-sex couples? Not voters. Not them. Who? Why, gay leadership. Gay organizations. EQCA and HRC.

Yes, that’s right. It’s their fault that Prop 8 passed. Not people who are life-long Christians who voted according to the fears instilled by playing against their life-long fears and hopes by lying Mormons and Catholics and other Christians, by pastors in their churches, by these very organizations from whom they get most of their life-direction.

Noooo, it was the leaders of HRC and EQCA who ran ads that gay activists didn’t like.

So it wasn’t the fault of the gay activist who’s out their protesting and trying to fix things now, post hoc. They’re out their doing it how it was supposed to be done, offing with their headsing and all that duff.

Post hocking ergoing propter hocking.

Blaming HRC because HRC is claiming they had no money to run ads earlier in the campaign. Why didn’t HRC have funds? Because too many people thought the HRC did the wrong thing in going step by step in getting federal legislation passed instead of an all or nothing approach. And what did those too many people who disagreed with HRC do? They stopped donating to HRC!

God, I hate the fact that there are nutso’s out there making me defend HRC. Yes, they have problems. Yes, I never bought into that “fighting for our rights from the inside” argument. But let’s be honest and let’s stop trying to salve our souls and calm our consciences for not having taken to the streets and reached for our wallets before Prop 8 passed instead of carrying out a 50-state bitchfest after the fact.

And when I called out a friend of mine about HRC and about the protests, asking “And will gay masses open a joint account and gang-produce ads and stage mass media buys?” he claimed they couldn’t do any worse than HRC did.

I call bullshit.

And when I accused the whole idea of claiming as proof that HRC was flawed if HRC does die off from lack of funding being self-fulling: “The crux of it is that if you push the notion that HRC is ineffectual and dead, then people will stop donating, which makes it broke which makes it ineffectual which makes it dead.”

His response? “Then something useful will replace it.”

“Something”.

Sounds like a plan.

From xkcd:

In FDR’s day, a fireside chat was the way to impress upon the citizenry that you were earnest and accessible. Everyone could related to a fireside back then. Hell, the word hearth still has a nearly primordial feel to it. Cozy, warm, one on one or at most a small gathering.

Of course, FDR’s fireside chats were made possible by television, and unlike today when authoring and publishing video content is a click away, generating and broadcasting video back then was a big deal.

Audio-only has always been much easier endpoint to endpoint: easier to record, store, transport, copy, broadcast, archive, playback. All these, coupled with the relatively high information density in audio (music, audiobooks, lectures, etc.), make it obvious that any form of audio-only address would be well worthwhile.

Even predating FDR’s fireside chats, Presidents of the United States have been making weekly radio addresses: radio’s been around longer than TV, of course, and it continues today. But there’s also iTunes, MP3s, Podcasts.

George W Bush’s radio addresses are available as an iTunes subscription (free). If you haven’t subscribed (not just manually downloaded) podcasts before, you really should give it a go. It’s how I watch Rachel Maddow every day: my master iTunes server subscribes to the Rachel Maddow video podcast (full episodes) and I watch it on my HDTV through my Apple TV. I can’t wait to get rid of cable.

But Barak Obama is the news of the day. Apparently when President Clinton was in office, he sent “at least one” email. Ahem. Who knows if W. ever even sent one. Or surfed the web. EVAR.

Today, Obama posted his first weekly video address.

And he did it right:

• he’s continuing to make Change.GOV the go-to place for his administration
• his weekly addresses will be, as I said, in video
• he posted the video to YouTube
• he provided the video and the transcript to change.gov
• he’s provided a downloadable copy of the video in HD (Quicktime, MPEG-4, H.264)

They got it all right.

A President of the United States who uses Macs, who uses the Internet and who expects to video iChat with his family when he’s away from home.

A 21st century POTUS.

You know that old fortune cookie trick “in bed”? (in bed!)

While watching (perhaps too much) HGTV, especially the rota of designer vehicle shows like Color Splash, Myles of Style, Divine Design (love herrrrrr!), Carter Can, etc., I came to realize that the one thing they all have in common is what they call “The Reveal”.

That’s the point in the show near the end when the work is done, the transformation has happened and when the flurries of astonished reactions happen.

There has to be careful editing of reactions, if not outright staging (of home and homeowner) because not everyone can love outcomes that are not 100% in their own control: they have to live with it.

And not all the reactions come out fully-gendered, if you will: Neither ‘Oh my gosh that’s wonderful!’ nor ‘Oh my gosh those colors make my eyes bleed!’

Not right away, at least. The details of what was done don’t get filled in until later.

But 100% of the reactions are positive. At least 100% of the ones I’ve ever seen. And this is no fun, no matter how much I love the hosts. And I do, otherwise I wouldn’t watch them.

So here’s the fortune-cookie-“in bed” game for HGTV reveals: just add “you bitch!” to the end of every exclamatory and you turn praise into horror! That’s all it takes!

Let’s try it out!

• Oh my gosh, you bitch!
• I can’t believe what you did to my room, you bitch!
• I hardly recognize the place, you bitch!
• Is this even my house, you bitch!
• I’m speechless, you bitch!
• It’s fabulous, you bitch! (ok, this one also requires sarcasm, and a bit of eye-rolling couldn’t hurt, either)

And I’m not being sexist here. I think at this point “bitch” works fine for women and men. Especially for the shows I watch. The male designers are either gay (Hi, David!) or you wish they were (Hi, Carter!) or they’re gay and you’re glad they are (Hi, David and/or Carter!)

C’mon, don’t you wanna see David Bromstad cry? I do, a little. I mean, in a punk’d kinda way. IloveyouDavidBromstadandyoucouldtotallyhavemybabies but you’re so fabulous that you could do crestfallen in a way that would stop traffic—in a screamingly splendiferous way.

I went to see Quantum of Solace today. I’m not one to go to movies on opening day (yeah, I know how old that makes me sound); hell, I’m not really one to make it to most movies in theatrical release (the upcoming theatrical release of Ciao excepted, of course).

Why today?

Well, why not.

The fog lifted. The headaches suddenly furloughed themselves for the most part: can’t blame the botox nor the topamax because they haven’t had time to get started doing their respective thangs yet.

I felt like crap this morning, to the point of having to cancel a meeting I was very much looking forward to. I slept a couple of hours and woke up feeling much better.

So why did I go to see Bond? Well, I did love the last Bond movie. Daniel Craig is my favorite Bond actor (Connery is Bond Legend). But that alone wasn’t enough. No, I’d read that the new Star Trek trailer was showing before the Bond flick, and I’ve been spending far too much time in the house since I got back from Pennsylvania, so I went.

*Squee!*

The trailer was soooo totally worth it. The shocking, sudden broad view of the Enterprise being built in the shipyard, all scaffolding and partial, but enough of a skeleton there to be unmistakably the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Sure, it’s different to any other Enterprise that’s ever been, but except for the original series’ ship, they’ve all been different.

It was the Berman-era Star Trek that brought the now-familiar glowy-red and glowy-blue motif to all Federation ships, a conceit and a foolish consistency to the point that it created horrible inconsistencies everywhere else in the Star Trek universe.

So for now I’m going to cut the director a break. It’s a beautiful ship and it’s the Enterprise.

Chris Pine is impossibly beautiful, nearly as much so as Paul Newman was in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

I can’t wait.

But back to the Bond flick. I know we’ve lived in this godforsaken MTV quick-edit era for nigh on 30 years now, but the opening car chase and the later climax scene are so scary they look like seizure-tests designed by Michael Bay.

But here’s the part that truly makes me want to barf. And god bless Giancarlo Giannini for trying so bloody hard to make Paul Haggis’ lines sound like something even a Bond-world human being say, but c’mon.

The setup: It’s an overnight flight. Bond is drunk. Mathis wakes up and talks to Bond, trying to console him about Vesper’s betrayal and death (this is not a spoiler, it happened in the last Bond movie).

Mathis: Do you want to try to sleep? I have pills. Bond: Pills? Mathis: I have pills for everything. Some make you taller; some make you forget.

Some. Make. You. Taller. Some. Make. You. Forget.

They fucking pay Haggis for this awful offal.

Now, I enjoy watching Morning Joe from time to time, but I never agreed with Scarborough when he went off on his sanctimonious ass about the Janet Jackson debacle calling for MTV and CBS to have to pay massive fines.

Poor widdle kiddies have to see things that they’ve probably already seen.

But today, Joe “slips up”, and we get to watch him make a mistake and then talk about how angry his wife is going to be that he said “the word” instead of just “the letter”.

As if the meaning of either isn’t the exact same thing. And both are just noises in the end.

So Joe, put up or shut up. Accumulate the damned fines you called for. And if you don’t have the money, and if NBC doesn’t have the money, then call on your right-wing friends who don’t want to hear such “filth” on the airwaves—those people surely have the money—and take the accumulated funds and donate the total amount to some worthy cause.

Or admit you’re an ideologue and shut up.

As if Joe would ever shut up.

I did some math and it turns out that if African Americans had remained reduced in personhood, much like seven in ten of them voted to do to us figgers (that’d be socially- and personally-demeaned gay folks like me), even 3/5 of a vote per 3/5ths-person would still have passed Proposition 8.

However, did you see what I did there? Back when Blacks were only considered 3/5 of a person, they didn’t yet have a vote. The 3/5 of a person applied to the U.S. Census of the time, where each Black counted at 3/5 of a person within a household owned by a white person.

So since it wouldn’t matter, insofar as Prop 8 went, should I now start some kind of proceeding—within a personal, selfish myopia—to restore an African American’s personhood to count only as 3/5 of a person?

Turnabout being fair play and all, I mean, why shouldn’t I start something like this? Those 7 out of 10 African American voters just went ahead and did the same thing to me.

Is forty-one years so long that African Americans (and the rest of us) have forgotten that their own choices in marriage were restricted by law? That the arguments were close to there very same arguments these so-called loving Christian folks are making?

Pastor Shirley Caesar-Williams of the Mount Calvary Word of Faith Church in Raleigh:

“Too long we’ve been at the bottom of the totem pole, but he has vindicated us, hallelujah,” she cried. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t have nothing to put my head down for, praise God. Because when I look toward Washington, D.C., we got a new family coming in. We got a new family coming in. And you know what? They look like us. Amen, amen. They look like us.”

Well, Pastor, you seem awfully contented to have that totem pole still in place. And this is exactly my point: you want that totem pole in place because you’ve forgotten how to measure your own worth independent of that totem pole.

And the funny thing about totem poles is that someone has to be at the bottom.

And that, dear readers, is the real reason behind 7 in 10 African American voters choosing in favor of Prop 8.

Don’t put your head donw, Rev. Caesar-Williams, because you might see us there where you helped put us.

You fucking sold us out so you could feel better about yourselves.

Praise 40% Jesus.

I’m so fucking annoyed and so fucking sick of plumbers already.

Still in the news, it turns out that the “I’m trying to buy a business and by that I mean I’m not trying to buy a business and I think you’re a socialist for trying to spread the wealth around but I’ve been on welfare—twice” non-plumber is still in the news.

I love ya, Rachel, but if I have to see Bald the Nonplumber one more time I’m going to scream.

Send him up to Alaska and gag both him and Palin, and let’s all get on with our lives.

There’s more interesting stuff, like Brent “Bozo” Buzzell, who’s hosting, as Rachel Maddow calls it, “The GOP Identity Crisis Summit” this week calling Obama a fiscal Reaganite just a week or two after calling him a capital-S Socialist.

Seriously. Identity crisis.

This is the time when white conservative men are angry and beat their dogs: watch out, Gay Patriots!…well, at least those of you who aren’t total S&M bottoms. In other words…watch out, Gay Patriots!

There was a protest in San Francisco tonight over the passage of Prop 8. I didn’t go. I’m still reeling from the whole man’s inhumanity to man thing…you know, those fuckers who voted to kill a basic human right, who’d been on the losing end of prejudice their entire lives only to latch onto the Obamaic coattails of their perceived ascendancy while kicking the gays down in the ditches to create more daylight between themselves and the new “n*ggers” on the block. That’d be us. Figgers, then, are we?

So please. I don’t need any plumbers or Palins or Pro-prejudice persons or other alliterative losers around me any more.

UPDATE: Stats about African American voters are in: 7 in 10 African Americans voted in favor of Prop 8. Thanks, hypocrites.

Not only do I think it’s possible that we’ve all been living with a certain kind of insanity for so long that we no longer have a pristine sense of center, but in fact, it’s true.

To borrow the psychotic repetitive talking points tack from the formerly in-power conservatives: it’s true, it’s true it’s true!

What the Right has failed to appreciate is that it’s the ideologues that are particularly susceptible to repetition and rite: they’ve bought into their own press. They now lack utterly the ability to observe and deduce.

To wit: those self-loathing gays over at gaypatriot.net seem to think that the reason that Prop 8 passed in a general vote was because the “Gay Liberal” leaders weren’t up to snuff. Here and I thought that the reason Prop 8 got more ‘yes’ votes was because of the fucking voters.

So long dependent and you can no longer exist without the host; you become a parasite.

And so the parasitic “please love me!” gays who’ve hung on every breath, every word of the Party who clearly brushes them aside as non-equals, are no longer able to do anything but ape those absentee/distant father-figures and whirl like dervishes, fingers pointing everywhere but at the real cause.

How difficult is it to understand that the results of a vote are due to the behaviors of the voters?

Behaviors I despise, as I’ve always despised hypocrisy. And I, too, wonder how those who know the sting of prejudice can themselves be so prejudicial; I wonder how those who pray to Jesus, who look to a liberal hippie like Jesus can turn around and go Pharisee all over those whom they themselves look down on.

Everyone needs a scapegoat. But Black Christians? Seriously? And gay adults? Seriously?

Over the next few months, all of us who consider ourselves emerging from the Long Night of the Conservative Assholes will be digging through our own memories of the last eight years, accumulating all those instances where we knew they were off their rockers but were impotent to do anything about it. “Activist Judges”, anyone?

In cataloging all those insults against honor, may we find ourselves recalibrated for a saner, more sober world where we can all take those deep, clean breaths, restoring oxygen to our brains and coming to understand where True North and our true centers are.

And once restored, we will instruct them. That’s what Jesus would do.

Other titles for this entry included

• Race & The French Revolution…former slaves == worst masters
• Vipers & Vituperation …robbed of joining in the merriment

I had that moment, like many of the people I know, at just past 20:00 PST, when MSNBC lit up the West Coast and pushed Obama over the top and into his Presidency. Unfortunately that was when I also started tracking the CA polling, specifically Prop 8.

With smaller counties (tending to be more conservative) reporting first, the numbers started arriving at about 55/45 in favor of Prop 8, which means 55% were in favor of removing an existing human right.

The needle didn’t move enough throughout the night.

Part of me was wishing that I hadn’t started to do the electoral math, but I’m hardly one to choose to remain ignorant, no matter how blissful: the unclouded eye is always best.

So, the math isn’t really math at all: more than half the people in CA voted for Barak Obama and more than half the people in CA voted in favor of eliminating an existing human right. That means that there were Obama voters who also voted yes on Prop 8.

Who the fuck are these people?

A first guess from SFGate:

In addition to conservative Republicans, it is thought that support for the same-sex marriage ban came from some Latinos, African Americans, and Chinese Americans who may have voted for religious reasons. So why don’t we hear from that portion of the city more often?

And those were in San Francisco!

So, you ethnic minorities (nationally minority) out there who voted for Obama, knowing full well what having a non-white person in the White House would gain you by fiat while at the same time deciding that another minority deserved to have rights taken away from them? Fuck you, you fucking small-minded, hateful fucks. Especially you African Americans who supported Obama and supported Prop 8.

Those African Americans who voted that way are even bigger hypocrites than George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld and Sarah Palin combined.

A big, big cheer to you African American fucks who decided in one fell swoop that you’d simultaneously choose a self-minded ascendancy and reduce the lives of others to less than your own.

Picture them: vast, joyous celebrations by some African Americans that they had one of their own installed as the most powerful person in the world and that they’d helped to install a demonized class so they could have someone else to look down on.

You African Americans (and other ethnic minorities) who demonized us, who got on your high horses and stood on your hypocrite pulpits to denounce prejudice this whole election cycle only to turn around and practice a special kind of hatred, one which actively removed someone else’s rights?

Fuck you.

I’m listening to McCain’s concession speech. It’s a beautiful speech and it feels as if he’s feeling the beautiful words he says.

He’s personal, he’s honorable, he’s decent. He ignored the initial boos from his supporters, but more importantly, he’s turned the crowd from boos into applause for the sentiments he’s expressed.

He’s uniting the country, or attempting to (we’ll see). I hope his supporters take his words to heart.

John the Class-Act is back.

I wish he’d never left.

It was just called: Barak Obama is the new President of the United States of America.

Holy Fuck.

Today in Wasilla, Alaska, as she stepped out of the voting booth, Sarah Palin refused to tell reporters who she voted for.

I just voted in my San Francisco neighborhood of Bernal Heights. No line! And even an empty voting table there waiting for me!

It’s a gorgeous day, splendid weather. San Francisco is showing off, just for me.

Concilliatory?

I’ve been saying for a while now that Election Day should be a National Holiday. Good lord, if any day should be a national one, it should be Election Day. I’d sacrifice Christmas for this one: Christmas is a religiously-partisan event and it warrants a day off.

This is where the rubber meets the road for all of those much-vaunted talking points: Freedom, Liberty, Choice, Destiny. You name it.

This is your only real opportunity to participate in History, folks. Don’t blow it by deciding not to decide: only cowards do that.

My friend Yen Tan just posted the new trailer for his amazing film, Ciao.

Why? Because it’s getting a theatrical release! I’m so happy for him. And me: I get to see it in the theater again.

There are DVD publishing plans, so I’m told, which means I’ll be able to watch it as often as I like—and I like.

It’s not that I have nothing to write about, it’s that I have no words to employ.

It’s more than writer’s block, and less. There are too many thoughts—a mindful mind full—and all clamor for my attention, an egoic disease from which the self is naturally immune.

I can hold it all in my head, the switchbacks and free-wheeling campaigns of the last six weeks (thankfully more campaign and less switchback), and good thing that is because there seems to be no release.

I hate words, an odd thing considering how many of them I know, but for readers (and not writers) literature contains miracles and for authors (and not readers-only) those miracles are nothing but the absence of friction and resistance in transmuting thought to word.

What can I say about having spent just about six weeks (exactly 44 days) with my family and not with my situational home in San Francisco? Family is undeniable, inscrutable, eternal (in temporary terms), its members temporary (as we all are), glorious, unbounded, a gathering of genetics and a flow of life.

San Francisco has been Home for over fifteen years and can I account for all that time slipping through and past me?

I cannot.

In time spent in NEPA with my family, time held firm with no slipping. As it did in the eight days I spent in Manhattan with Bill & Edgar. Each day was discrete, dividing up the indivisible into companionable, abiding pieces. Six weeks isn’t always six weeks.

I’m at the Philadelphia airport, a rabbit-warren of low-ceilinged, overly-linear tunnels that for some godforsaken reason has won a J.D. Powers award for traveler satisfaction. Whuuuuh?

I’m stuck here for 2 hours, 22 minutes before I get on a plane to return to the City.

I don’t know what I’ll find there, but it can be described by the following equation: everything minus what-I’m-leaving-behind.

And that seems incalculable at the moment.