Monday November 8, 2004

I’ve got a room at the top of the world tonight

Solidly good weekend. Not a great weekend; that would have to involve someone wanting to pay me for my writing, a winning Lotto ticket, or sex with some total hottie.

A good weekend, on the other hand, involves the Bucs and the Bills both winning over decent opponents, me spending a little time with my family, and then checking out The Incredibles and Shaun of the Dead today. Oh, I also got my copy of Colin Wilson’s brilliant A Criminal History of Mankind in the mail today, after ordering it nearly two weeks ago. And talked the city into letting me slide until Friday on my water bill, which freed up the funds to go to the movies. (Talking the local government into cutting me any kind of slack came as a surprise; I’d tried getting some extra time on the water bill from these people once before when I lived with my brother Paul, and they firmly declined to be even remotely helpful. However, I have always paid my water bills in a reasonably timely fashion, while I guess Paul had long since exhausted any patience they might have once had with him by the time I moved in to his place.)

Not a world beater of a weekend, mind you, and my country is still apparently more than half populated by dimwits who believe the guy who stole the 2000 election and caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths in a foreign land, after using his daddy’s influence to duck out on his own chance to tote a gun in an entirely different unnecessary war, is more ‘moral’ than his opponent. But… never mind, never mind… at least, for a few more paragraphs.

The Incredibles and Shaun of the Dead are both wonderful movies, and I find them both worthy to be owned when they come out on DVD. The Incredibles, like Unbreakable before it, is going to suffer from the superhero stigma; if you’re not a fan of the genre, you aren’t going to enjoy it, or at least, you’re not going to get a lot of the inside jokes. I suspect this is the reason it’s getting a little bit lambasted by the same critics who so thoroughly despised Unbreakable. At least in this case there’s been no effort made to keep the theme a secret, so people know what they are getting when they buy their tickets. I found it thoroughly delightful, but I am already braced for it to be hailed as the least and most minor effort from Pixar yet… as if an epic tale about a lot of lost fucking FISH is so frickin’ splendid. (Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Finding Nemo, but it’s a lightweight… it ain’t no Monsters, Inc, and it certainly ain’t no The Incredibles).

Shaun of the Dead is pretty hilarious, and even has a great ending… something you generally don’t expect from a zombie movie, even one shot as a horror/comedy. (The only other successful horror/comedy I can think of, An American Werewolf In London, certainly didn’t have anything like an upbeat ending.) Oddly, the first comparison that comes to mind, after Werewolf, is not to any other zombie movie, but to the Coen Brothers’ equally surreal comedy Raising Arizona. Both movies feature main characters who are in a transitional state and who find themselves extremely confused by it. Both of them are being impelled, somewhat against their wills, to move on beyond the extended adolescence of their single, early adult years by the women in their lives, and neither of them are particularly happy about it. In both cases, a life changing exterior event occurs to forcibly lift both men out of their ruts and set them in motion towards realizing their potential. Of course, in one movie it’s a kidnapped baby, while in the other it’s an onslaught of the living dead, but still, the primary emotional arc of each film revolves around their male central characters being forced into new roles that they have to adopt, and then make real, for the sake of the people they love. And the primary character driver of both films is the rampant confusion and hesitation both male protagonists experience as their worlds fall apart all around them.

Both movies are hilarious, both are populated with bizarrely three dimensional, memorable, and hysterically funny supporting characters, and both involve hitting bad people in the heads with large heavy objects.

Oh, I also bought and watched the new Dawn of the Dead last payday, a week ago last Friday. According to a guy I work with, I am typical of the pattern, which is, those of us who saw the original first still think it’s a better film, while young shallow punks whose attention spans have been steadily eroded by 30 years of MTV, the Children’s Television Workshop and Republican soundbytes vastly prefer the new version, apparently because the original “is just too slooooooow, dude”.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the new Dawn, in fact, in places, I like it very much. However, despite the presence of Ving Rhames, whom everybody I have ever spoken to just thinks is totally cool, I have to say that anyone who honestly believes this action/horror opus, which feels rather like Escape From New York meets The Warriors, is a better film than its precursor, or in fact, even as good, is just dain bramaged.

Conservative estimates

One of the low points of yesterday’s brunch at my brother Pat’s rather large suburban home was a political discussion he and I got into while I was out watching him hose a lot of pigeon crap off his company car.

I tried to avoid it. I didn’t bring up anything political, just as I don’t bring up anything I might find remotely touchy with Pat, because I do not want to get into a fight with him that might fester. I love Pat, and respect him, and admire him, as much as I can respect and admire anyone who is so ardently and unthinkingly conservative as he is. I dislike getting into positions where I have to face the fact that such a pleasant, likable, intelligent guy, whom I spent most of my childhood babysitting, is soulless enough to so fervently and unthinkingly embrace such a monstrous regime of lies, cowardice, disenfranchisement, and mass atrocity as currently 'administers' these here United States.

I also try not to bring up that Pat never calls me, or in any way acknowledges my existence, unless some exterior impetus causes us to get together. He’s always pleasant when we’re together, but I suppose it’s possible he may have some issues with me left over from childhood. I was not always the best big brother imaginable, in fact, on some specific occasions, I suppose I was a fairly dreadful one. I’d honestly prefer to think it’s that, and not that Pat is utterly self absorbed as so many conservatives are… but I don’t know.

All I know is, I tried to avoid it, he brought it up, I tried to get out of it by saying “You and I shouldn’t have that discussion”, he was gently but firmly insistent in following up on the subject, and, well, we ended up in a long discussion on gay marriage, of all things, that accomplished absolutely nothing except, I suspect, frustrating both of us.

It’s interesting, though. When I occasionally hear this poisonous, ignorant, hateful crud spewing at me out of someone’s talk radio speaker, or, more often, from some slope browed emotional retardate I work with, it’s easy for me to just snort and dismiss it. When it’s coming out of the mouth of someone I love, and even respect in many ways, it’s tougher to shake off. I suppose that’s good. I try to keep an open mind, and in point of fact, several seriously left of center liberals I have known in the past have been truly appalled at my assertion that I am one of them, due to several social/political opinions I have that they simply find unacceptable. Yet I don’t consider myself a moderate, either; my opinions, where I have them, are quite extreme, and most conservative doctrine I simply find to be loathsome.

Nonetheless, debating things with Pat made me think about the mindset he was speaking from, and it made me realize a few things.

These aren’t exactly new realizations to me, they are more like things I simply manage to keep forgetting. Nonetheless, they are things that it is necessary to keep in mind, and for that (and for the french toast brunch and the big screen TV I got to watch the Bucs beat the Chiefs on) I am grateful to Pat.

Pat said a lot of things during our discussion. One was that he didn’t hate gays, he has a lot of gay friends. (When I said this was such a close reiteration of a the classic line given by white bigots in the 60s and 70s to prove they weren’t bigots that it very nearly had to be either parody or satire, he did not seem pleased.) Another thing Pat mentioned was that liberals like me never want to admit that gay marriage is a legitimate social issue, and if gays are allowed to marry, it will erode our cultural perception of what marriage is and legitimize all sorts of completely unacceptable practices. Yet another point, which he hit on repeatedly, was that America is a country that is ruled by majority vote. Clearly there are a majority of conservatives in the country today, sez Pat, and therefore, if the conservative majority says gay marriage is a legitimate issue of social concern, then, well, it is.

Beyond this, he startled me by stating that marriage is a privilege, not a right. I was shocked to hear anyone as conservative as Pat say that out loud. The statement is entirely correct; there is certainly no inalienable individual right to get tax breaks, or free insurance coverage, or the ability to make medical decisions for someone else, by signing a piece of paper alongside your significant other. Nonetheless, most conservatives are careful not to bring that up, since the logical answer to that is, fine, if it’s a privilege, and it’s not one you’re willing to extend to every American, then let’s get rid of all the legalities surrounding marriage, and just have people define their own personal relationships without involving the courts.

Try putting that position forward, and I would be willing to be you any conservative you might talk to will suddenly be vociferously defending marriage as a right. It's just only a right for heterosexuals, and not those goddam pinko polygamous heterosexuals, either.

(For what it’s worth, I think it should be extremely difficult to get married and extremely easy to get divorced, and other than that, I think anyone should be able to marry anyone else they can convince to hold still long enough for it, and undergo all the procedures necessary to accomplish it. Far too many people marry far too casually, and that is a far more severe and significant 'erosion of the sanctity of marriage’ than gays wanting to get hitched will ever be.)

He also brought up that all liberals want to do is change things that are perfectly fine the way they are… marriage, prayer in school, ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance. These things are part of American culture, things that people take comfort in and are proud of, things that people prize and want to keep… but liberals just don’t get that. Liberals want to mess around with everything, and tear down everything good and decent, and destroy everything that decent average Americans are proud of.

I will admit, he seemed a tiny bit annoyed when he said it, too.

And it was right then that it struck me: the conservative viewpoint is essentially un-American. Yeah, I know. Given that conservatives so successfully wrap the American flag around every single view they espouse, that seems rather counter-intuitive. It is, nonetheless, true.

If there is one defining principle underlying the very concept of America as a country, it is individual liberty. Individual rights. Individual freedom of choice. The innate, irrefutable, inalienable right of every human being, or at least, every American, to do whatever the hell they feel like doing, at any given time, in any given place, provided that (a) it doesn’t interfere with any other person’s identical individual freedom of choice and/or expression and (b), of course, they have the pragmatic ability to do it.

Every single high profile change my brother bitched at me about, that liberals like me have tried very hard to enact on our society… the elimination of school prayer, the removal of the phrase ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance, and the removal of legal and cultural hindrances to any adult Americans anywhere being able to get married… is actually a question of removing a particular constraint on individual freedom.

Taking prayer out of schools is not repression. Kids and adults can pray all they want anywhere else they want, including on street corners and at bus stops, if they feel like it. Prohibiting prayer, or any other particular religious expression, in schools, is an acknowledgement of the fact that the law requires American citizens below a certain age to be present at school for a certain amount of their finite lifetime. Since Federal law forces a great many Americans to be in certain places at certain times, it cannot require, or even allow, those Americans to be subjected to religious indoctrination while they are there.

American conservatives are outraged that their kids aren’t allowed to pray in school; however, they would be similarly outraged if school prayer was allowed, and an Islamic teacher led his or her kids in a recital from the Koran, or a Buddhist teacher attempted to impart the wisdom of Gautama to a class. Banning all school prayer simply says ‘the Federal government will not allow any religious expression during activities that are funded by taxpayer money’. That is correct, it is Constitutional, and it protects the rights of every American on public school grounds to believe, or not believe, anything they want, without fear of reprisal.

In other words, what American conservatives are protesting is the removal of Christian prayer from schools, and, beyond that, the removal of Christian theology and Christian morals training from science and social studies classrooms. To them, free expression of religion means the right to freely worship in a decent Christian manner.

As to the Pledge of Allegiance, the entire thing is an embarrassment to a great, supposedly free nation that prizes individual liberty above all else. The Pledge was originated by Red baiters and has never been intended to be anything more or less than an American loyalty oath, and it has a shameful history. In the 40s and 50s, Quakers were imprisoned in military stockades for refusing to take the Pledge, and within the last decade public school teachers have been fired for refusing to lead classes in saying it.

The phrase ‘under God’ was added to the text when someone pointed out that without it, the Pledge bore a scary resemblance to similar oaths recited by young Communist Party members in the Soviet Union. The very idea of forcing Americans to recite a loyalty oath every morning they are in a publicly funded classroom is repugnant to everything America is supposed to stand for.

I personally don’t think the courts went far enough in striking down “under God”, the whole Pledge should have long since been expunged as the rotten, half assed, incompetent, emotionally retarded and ethically corrupt brainwashing tool it really is.

When conservatives, and many misguided moderates and even liberals, went berserk at the notion of removing ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance, they were responding with utter emotionalism to what they perceived as being an attack on something that was an intrinsic and fundamental part of their golden hued childhood memories. For moderates and liberals, there is no excuse for this kind of reaction; we are supposed to be the few remaining people who still think and reason about things, instead of reacting to every new stimulus with the emotional responses of the 11 year olds we once were. From conservatives, a virulent gut-check is all I expect, but from others, I expect more.

As with nearly any issue American conservatives become outraged about, one need only imagine this conflict recast in the specific terms of any other religion to understand what their real agenda is. Suggest rewriting the Pledge (which I loathe in its entirety, remember) to say “under Allah” (‘Allah’ is simply Arabic for ‘God’) and watch every conservative in the country have a simultaneous aneurysm… or at least, I can dream…

As to gay marriage, conservative opposition to this is simply based in and motivated by hateful bigotry and nothing else. I myself feel it; I am as homophobic as any mostly straight male born in 1961 and raised in America in the 60s and 70s necessarily has to be. As with any unthinking bias against any individual on the basis of something that cannot be controlled, I dislike this homophobia in myself, and I try to rise above it. Nonetheless, I’m not comfortable with openly professed homosexuality, and that’s just how I am. And I point this out here, not simply in the cause of full disclosure, but also to show that I do not regard myself as some great champion of gay rights. Unlike my brother, I do not profess to have any gay friends. I know very few gay people, most of them are people I work with, and I am close to none of them and don’t even like most of them very much.

Nonetheless, I am a huge champion of human rights and I loathe discrimination, and when a culture allows certain lawful privileges and statures and social considerations to one pair of human beings, and denies those same lawful privileges, statures, and considerations to another pair of human beings, simply on the basis of sexual orientation, that culture is committing an onerous injustice.

To be a practicing, professing Christian is far more a matter of choice than individual sexuality is; if the government tried to restrict Christians from getting married, or even charge them more for a marriage license on the grounds that Christians tend to be more of a pain in the ass after they get married than agnostics are, because when they send their kids to public schools they immediately start bitching about school prayer, there would be open revolt.

Beyond that, even Pat was willing to admit that he does not think that gays should be precluded from walking into the courthouse and transferring title on a property deed, or filing for a business license, or paying a traffic ticket, or getting a jury trial if arrested, or being able to confront witnesses against them. Gays should, in other word, have equal access to every legal process, right, and privilege anyone else has available to them, under our legal system…

…except marriage.

Nonetheless, when liberals want to see every American equally enjoy the same rights, privileges, access, opportunity, and status as everyone else is entitled to, under law… conservatives (or at least, my brother) find it upsetting. We are not, after all, trying to change society so that everybody can fully and freely enjoy their individual freedom of choice to the fullest extent allowable by a civilized social contract and our own Constitution.

No, instead, we are trying to destroy a fundamentally decent American way of life.

Pat did not want to listen to me when I said that I regarded these ‘liberal intrusions’ as signs of the slow but grudging social and emotional evolution of Americans as a culture, and humanity as a race… but I do. The fundamentally decent American way of life conservatives are fighting so hard to maintain, and in many ways, even re-create, was not American in spirit at all. Most if not all American conservatives of the early 21st Century seem to be wistfully, if not violently, nostalgic for the 1950s… an era when intelligent folk were dismissed as ‘eggheads’, when being an ‘average American’ was the ultimate accolade, when anyone who openly criticized the government was obviously a Red, when black people knew their place and kept to it, and you never even heard about gays or child molesters at all.

It was an age of fear and paranoia, when anti-intellectual hysteria and a dangerous mob mentality simmered constantly just beneath every surface. It was an era of rampant conformism, when the maverick kids expressed their iconoclastic tendencies by wearing their hats backwards, when paranoia reigned supreme because everybody knew there were Commie infiltrators, lousy Red saboteurs, and disgusting pinko subversives in the schools, in the parks, at the bus stops, and maybe even living right next door.

This was a time and a place where flouride in the water was a Commie plot to give the average American Joe cancer, where decent people went to church every Sunday, where skirts were long and cars were huge and there were no unwed mothers or uppity negroes. Wages were up, prices were down, real estate, housing, and gasoline were all cheap, and jobs were plentiful… as long as you weren’t on a blacklist.

I often get the feeling that most modern day conservatives would happily step back through time to the 1950s, which they all seem to regard as some sort of long lost Golden Age. It makes perfect sense… conservatives dislike and distrust intellectualism, they despise non-conformity, and they flourish best in an atmosphere of terror… after all, if you’re not with us, you’re against us, and don’t you know there’s a war on, mister?

Yes, conservatives would all love to jump in a time machine and head back to the 1950s, but they can’t. So instead, they are doing their best to turn the clock back for all of us to the 1950s… a simpler time, a sweeter, gentler, more compassionate time, where gays were all inveterate bachelors and maiden ladies, where blacks were happy to be fry cooks and janitors and maids, where only Reds were atheists, and we knew how to handle those no good ratniks, you bet!

The problem is, the conservatives are trying to take the rest of us back to the 1950s with them, and a lot of us don’t want to go… but then, they don’t see that as a problem. Conservatives never care what other people want, because, after all, if you’re not with us, you’re against us, to be anti-war is to be pro-terrorist, and all liberals want is to tear down the American way of life.

I say, dissent, and non-conformity, and making your own choices, and wanting everyone to have the same rights and the same privileges under the same laws, is the essence of and the foundation beneath the American way of life. I believe that when you stifle debate, when you hate those who are different from you, when you insist that ‘decency’ can only be defined as ‘just like me’, when you expend endless energy making certain that a specific minority cannot have the same rights and privileges and opportunities as the remainder of the population, and especially when you vociferously defend all of these things on the grounds that they are a beloved part of your cultural heritage, you are anti-American.

And I also strongly believe that when you try to justify such intellectual, emotional, and psychological tyranny with terms like ‘American’ and ‘patriotism’ and ‘allegiance’ and ‘good citizenship’, when you wrap such toxic, hateful, irrational bigotry up in the Stars and Stripes and demand that everyone salute it or face sanctions, you are not only insulting what America actually stands for, you are actively betraying it.

When the rulers of Orwell’s 1984 re-defined terms and phrases to suit their own political convenience, Orwell called it ‘newspeak’. When the Nazis and Communists used to do it, we referred to it as ‘propaganda’.

When conservatives in America do it, they call it ‘talk radio’ and ‘paid political advertisements’ and ‘campaign speeches’ and (I like this one best of all) ‘a free and unfettered exchange of ideas’.

One more thing, and I’m done with this, for a little while, anyway:

If the American populace had put as much energy into opposing the war in Iraq as they very recently did into opposing gay marriage, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people (over a thousand of them American soldiers) who are currently dead… wouldn’t be.

Good thing them queers can’t get married, huh? I mean, we wouldn’t want the traditional perception of marriage to be eroded, or anything.

And if we could just get prayer in schools back, then our kids could thank God every day for giving a majority of American citizens the wisdom to get their priorities straight.

Hey, I’m talking like one of those goddam pinko eggheads. Somebody needs to put me on one of those government lists, or something…

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.