You Gotta Read This

Faux-pression: Racism and the Cult of White Victimhood

2010-07-22T10:11:00.003+02:00

by Tim Wise
20 July 2010
from The Daily Kos

To hear conservatives tell it, there's a one-sided race war going on in America, and white folks are the targets. From President Obama's secret plan to use health care reform as a way to procure backdoor "reparations" for slavery, to his equally secret plan to wreck the economy as a way to pay white people back for centuries of racial oppression, to his personal responsibility for a fight on a school bus in Belleville, Illinois, in which two black kids beat up a white kid, it's open season on white America. And of course, in case you weren't convinced, surely that tax on tanning bed customers that was part of the health care bill should suffice to make the case: after all, it's a clear slap at white folks and the result of the President's deep antipathy towards those of us lacking sufficient melanin.

Into the breach of white hysteria--heightened by Rush Limbaugh's claim that Colin Powell only endorsed Obama as an act of racial bonding, and that the President only appoints people to high office or the Supreme Court who hate whites--now come two stories, spun for maximum effect by the right and its media mouthpieces at FOX News. To wit, the so-called scandal surrounding the Justice Department's handling of voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), and the recent allegation that a black official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Shirley Sherrod, admits to having mistreated a white farmer who was seeking government help, at least in part because of his race.

Since the Panther story broke, and today in the wake of the white farmer incident, I've been inundated by angry e-mails, demanding to know when I was going to join the fight against "black racism," and speak out as forcefully about bigotry aimed at whites as I do about bigotry aimed at people of color. One e-mail suggested that I needed to issue an apology for previous columns I'd penned, in which I had argued that reverse racism was a myth, since people of color are generally powerless to turn their biases into concrete action that truly injures white people. Obviously, the author said, things have changed. Now a black-led Justice Department in a black-led administration does have the power to collaborate with anti-white racism, "as in the case of the Black Panthers," and a black official in the Ag Department has the power to "deliberately mistreat" a white farmer and then brag about it.

But as it turns out, new evidence has surfaced indicating that the uproar about Shirley Sherrod has no merit. Right-wing blogger Andrew Brietbart posted edited video of a speech in which Sherrod ostensibly made fun of a white farmer and joked about not doing all she could to help him. But in fact, the rest of her story as told during the speech (which Brietbart conveniently did not post, and which FOX News has also ignored) details how she learned from her interactions with the farmer that her initial cavalier attitude about his situation was unfair, and how once she realized that, she went all out to help him save his farm. According to the family itself, she did just that, and they consider her a friend. In other words, the story was about not making assumptions on the basis of race and not discriminating. But in the hands of the right, Sherrod is a bitter racist out to hurt salt-of-the-Earth white farm folks, evidence be damned.

Likewise, the New Black Panther Party debacle is rooted in a level of intellectual mendacity that is rare even for a right-wing that has demonstrated its willingness to race-bait black folks for years without compunction.

In the case of the New Black Panther Party, the so-called intimidation of white voters by black militants led to an injunction against the leader of the Philadelphia chapter--the only one who was carrying a potential weapon, a nightstick, outside the polling place on election day, 2008. In other words, punishment was forthcoming and King Samir Shabazz, the only Panther against whom a case could have been made, has been legally held responsible for his actions. This, in spite of the fact that not one voter ever stepped forward to indicate they had been intimidated, or threatened, or blocked from voting. Even the Civil Rights Commission's leading conservative Republican says the right-wing/FOX feeding frenzy over the story is unwarranted.

But despite the vapidity of the story, FOX has hyped it with over nine hours of breathless coverage, giving airtime to those who continue to insist that the Obama Administration "dropped the charges" against the Panthers because of a political/racial directive not to pursue cases involving white victims. This, despite the fact that it was the Bush Administration that dropped the criminal charges, and the Obama Administration that successfully got an injunction put in place against Shabazz. And again, despite the fact that not one white voter has even hinted that they were victimized. Interestingly, FOX has given spokespersons for the New Black Panthers--a small group with no significant reach or influence--continued airtime over the years, with more than 50 appearances on various of the network's shows. In other words, the right sees the political payoff in keeping whites afraid of black anger, and has done everything they can to feed white fear, both before and after these immediate stories broke.

However, as phony as these stories happen to be, there is actually a more important point to be made regarding racism, how we do (or don't) understand it, and how media chooses to cover it as a subject.

So let's consider the distinction I've made in those previous essays--the ones that had my electronic adversary so angry--between white racial bias and institutionalized racism against people of color on the one hand, and occasional bouts of black or brown racial bias on the other. My argument has never been that folks of color can't be philosophically racist. Nor have I said that they cannot, on occasion, practice racial discrimination against whites. What I have said (and frankly what the New Black Panther story and the Shirley Sherrod incident confirm, even if they had happened exactly as the right has spun them) is that there is a fundamental difference, in practical terms, between these various types of racism.

Racial bias on the part of black folks, even the most vicious and unhinged bigotry on their part, is pretty impotent. King Samir Shabazz hates white people and thinks "cracker babies" should be killed. And yet what kind of power does Shabazz have? None. He is in a position to kill no one, and if he were to try he would go to jail. Forever. That's not power. Power is when you can deny people jobs, housing, health care, decent educations, or their physical freedom via the justice system, thereby wrecking their lives. And there are virtually no black folks--and certainly no black folks wearing berets, fake-ass military uniforms and carrying nightsticks--who can do any of that. But there are white folks in positions to do those things, and who do them with or without bigoted intent regularly, as I have demonstrated in previous essays and books.

Likewise, even the NBPP's ability to intimidate white voters (in theory, since there were no such white voters in the instant case) pales in comparison to the actual denial of the right to vote to millions of black men--one in seven nationally, and as many as one in four in several states--because they are ex-felons. As law professor and scholar Michelle Alexander discusses in her brilliant new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, despite serving their time and paying their debt to society these people of color are disallowed from voting forever. Not by white thugs standing outside a polling place, but by perfectly legal actions taken by state legislatures many years ago, for blatantly racist reasons, and which the courts have said are acceptable despite their racial impact.

And even on the individual level, while the Panther leader has been legally sanctioned for his actions, and while the story about King Samir Shabazz has received non-stop coverage on FOX, the Bush Justice Department really did ignore voter intimidation allegations against the anti-immigrant Minutemen in Arizona in 2006. And that case--in which the Minutemen stood outside the polling place with loaded weapons, questioning Latino voters about their ability to speak English--received zero coverage on FOX News, despite assurances by FOX's Megyn Kelly (the most animated of those pushing the Panther story) that the "voting place is sacrosanct." Apparently not for Latinos, and not for the millions of black men who can no longer vote because of antiquated and racist laws. Oh, and not for the voters of color who former Supreme Court Chief Justice and conservative hero William Rehnquist intimidated at the polls during his early days as a Republican activist That is the difference between white and other racism, and it matters.

So too, even if Shirley Sherrod had been a horrible anti-white bigot in the Department of Agriculture (and interestingly the incident about which the right has made such a stink didn't even happen when she was in that Department, but rather, nearly a quarter century ago when she worked for a non-profit agency), the fact would remain, the impact of her "bigotry" would have been small potatoes compared to the institutionalized discrimination meted out to black farmers for generations. On the basis of overwhelming evidence that black farmers were treated differently and worse than their white counterparts over the years by the USDA, those victimized by the government sought legal remedies. The first lawsuit was settled during the Clinton Administration, while a second group of farmers--cut out of the first case for technical reasons--recently procured from the Obama Administration an agreement to settle their claims for a little over $1 billion. Even the USDA's own Commission on Small Farms has acknowledged the history of persistent and "blatant" discrimination against tens of thousands of black farmers by the agency. Yet Congress has still not released the monies due to these actual victims of racism, and seems in no hurry to do so. And the media has given the story almost no coverage, unlike the Sherrod incident, which, as it turns out, had no basis in fact to begin with.

Once again, a case of individual racism--which turned out to be phony anyway--gets the attention, while the institutionalized mistreatment of people of color goes ignored.

The pattern is familiar. In every generation whites have hyped fears of black anger, black bigotry and the supposed desire of African Americans to exact revenge on whites. From fears about slave rebellions, to claims that integration would lead black children to knife white children in the hallways and rape white girls, to paranoia about Obama's secret plan for "white slavery," the cult of white victimhood has long had its charter members. Sadly, nowadays the cult has the attention of the media and a white public already anxious about changing demographics, the presence of a black president and economic insecurity. Unless the targets of their race-baiting (including the President) show the courage to push back and expose them for the venal fear-pimps they are, their methods will only get more extreme, their lies more bold, and their ability to inflict lasting damage on the nation more definitive.

Tim Wise is the author of five books on race and racism. His latest is, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat From Racial Equity (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010)

Shallow Graves: The Novels of Paul Auster - James Woods

2009-12-04T11:11:00.008+01:00

The New Yorker
November 30, 2009

For all the postmodern maneuvers, Auster is the least ironic of contemporary writers.

Roger Phaedo had not spoken to anyone for ten years. He confined himself to his Brooklyn apartment, obsessively translating and retranslating the same short passage from Rousseau’s “Confessions.” A decade earlier, a mobster named Charlie Dark had attacked Phaedo and his wife. Phaedo was beaten to within an inch of his life; Mary was set on fire, and survived just five days in the I.C.U. By day, Phaedo translated; at night, he worked on a novel about Charlie Dark, who was never convicted. Then Phaedo drank himself senseless with Scotch. He drank to drown his sorrows, to dull his senses, to forget himself. The phone rang, but he never answered it. Sometimes, Holly Steiner, an attractive woman across the hall, would silently enter his bedroom, and expertly rouse him from his stupor. At other times, he made use of the services of Aleesha, a local hooker. Aleesha’s eyes were too hard, too cynical, and they bore the look of someone who had already seen too much. Despite that, Aleesha had an uncanny resemblance to Holly, as if she were Holly’s double. And it was Aleesha who brought Roger Phaedo back from the darkness. One afternoon, wandering naked through Phaedo’s apartment, she came upon two enormous manuscripts, neatly stacked. One was the Rousseau translation, each page covered with almost identical words; the other, the novel about Charlie Dark. She started leafing through the novel. “Charlie Dark!” she exclaimed. “I knew Charlie Dark! He was one tough cookie. That bastard was in the Paul Auster gang. I’d love to read this book, baby, but I’m always too lazy to read long books. Why don’t you read it to me?” And that is how the ten-year silence was broken. Phaedo decided to please Aleesha. He sat down, and started reading the opening paragraph of his novel, the novel you have just read.

Yes, that précis is a parody of Paul Auster’s fiction, l’eau d’Auster in a sardonic sac. It is unfair, but diligently so, checking off most of his work’s familiar features. A protagonist, nearly always male, often a writer or an intellectual, lives monkishly, coddling a loss—a deceased or divorced wife, dead children, a missing brother. Violent accidents perforate the narratives, both as a means of insisting on the contingency of existence and as a means of keeping the reader reading—a woman drawn and quartered in a German concentration camp, a man beheaded in Iraq, a woman severely beaten by a man with whom she is about to have sex, a boy kept in a darkened room for nine years and periodically beaten, a woman accidentally shot in the eye, and so on. The narratives conduct themselves like realistic stories, except for a slight lack of conviction and a general B-movie atmosphere. People say things like “You’re one tough cookie, kid,” or “My pussy’s not for sale,” or “It’s an old story, pal. You let your dick do your thinking for you, and that’s what happens.” A visiting text—Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Hawthorne, Poe, Beckett—is elegantly slid into the host book. There are doubles, alter egos, doppelgängers, and appearances by a character named Paul Auster. At the end of the story, the hints that have been scattered like mouse droppings lead us to the postmodern hole in the book where the rodent got in: the revelation that some or all of what we have been reading has probably been imagined by the protagonist. Hey, Roger Phaedo invented Charlie Dark! It was all in his head.

Paul Auster’s latest book, “Invisible” (Holt; $25), though it has charm and vitality in places, conforms to the Auster model. It is 1967. Adam Walker, a young poet studying literature at Columbia, mourns the loss of his brother, Andy, who drowned in a lake ten years before the novel opens. At a party, Adam meets the flamboyant and sinister Rudolf Born, Swiss by birth, of German-speaking and French-speaking parentage. Born is a visiting professor, teaching the history of French colonial wars, about which he appears to have decided views. “War is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul,” he tells a startled Adam. He tries to get Adam to sleep with his girlfriend. Later, we learn that he has worked clandestinely for the French government, and may even be a double agent.

Perhaps because Rudolf Born is so obviously a figure from spy movies—Auster could have called his novel “The Born Supremacy”—he never sounds remotely like the person he’s supposed to be, a fastidious and well-educated French-speaking European of the nineteen-sixties. He says things like “Your ass will be so cooked, you won’t be able to sit down again for the rest of your life,” or “We’re still working on the stew” (about a lamb navarin), or “All I have to do is pull it out of my pants, piss on the fire, and the problem is solved.” He takes an immediate interest in Adam, and gives him money to set up a literary magazine. “I see something in you, Walker, something I like,” he says, sounding oddly like Burt Lancaster in “Local Hero,” “and for some inexplicable reason I find myself willing to take a gamble on you.” For “some inexplicable reason,” indeed: Auster anxiously confesses his own creative lack.

This being an Auster novel, accidents visit the narrative like automobiles falling from the sky. One evening, while walking along Riverside Drive, Born and Walker are held up by a young black man, Cedric Williams. “The gun was pointed at us, and just like that, with a single tick of the clock, the entire universe had changed” is Walker’s banal gloss. Born refuses to hand over his wallet, draws a switchblade, and ruthlessly stabs the young man (whose gun, it turns out, was unloaded). Walker knows that he should call the police, but the next day Born sends a threatening letter: “Not a word, Walker. Remember: I still have the knife, and I’m not afraid to use it.” Full of shame, Walker goes to the authorities, but Born has left for Paris.

One might tolerate the corny Born, and his cinemaspeak, if Adam Walker, who narrates much of the novel in one way or another, were not himself such a bland and slack writer. He is supposed to be a dreamy young poet, but he’s half in love with easeful cliché. Born “was just thirty-six, but already he was a burnt-out soul, a shattered wreck of a person,” we’re told. Adam has an affair with Born’s girlfriend, but “deep down I knew it was finished.” Born was “deep in his cups by the time he poured the cognac.” “Why? I said, still reeling from the impact of Born’s astounding recitation about my family.”

Although there are things to admire in Auster’s fiction, the prose is never one of them. (Most of the secondhand cadences in my parody—about drinking to drown his sorrows, or the prostitute’s eyes being too hard and having seen too much—are taken verbatim from Auster’s previous work.) “Leviathan” (1992), for instance, is supposedly narrated by an American novelist, a stand-in for Paul Auster named Peter Aaron, who tells us about the doomed life of another writer, Benjamin Sachs. But Peter Aaron can’t be much of a writer. He describes Benjamin Sachs’s first novel like this: “It’s a whirlwind performance, a marathon sprint from the first line to the last, and whatever you might think of the book as a whole, it’s impossible not to respect the author’s energy, the sheer gutsiness of his ambitions.” Lest you are tempted to chalk all this up to an unreliable narrator—“But he’s supposed to write like that”—consider August Brill, the seventy-two-year-old literary critic who narrates Auster’s novel “Man in the Dark” (2008). Like Nathan Zuckerman in “The Ghost Writer,” he lies awake in a New England house, inventing fantastic fictions. (He imagines an alternative universe, in which America is fighting a bitter civil war over the fate of the 2000 election.) When he thinks about actual America, however, his language stiffens into boilerplate. Recalling the Newark riots of 1968, he describes a member of the New Jersey State Police, “a certain Colonel Brand or Brandt, a man of around forty with a razor-sharp crew cut, a square, clenched jaw, and the hard eyes of a marine about to embark on a commando mission.”

Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises are intricately bound up with modern and postmodern literature. For Flaubert, the cliché and the received idea are beasts to be toyed with and then slain. “Madame Bovary” actually italicizes examples of foolish or sentimental phrasing. Charles Bovary’s conversation is likened to a pavement, over which many people have walked; twentieth-century literature, violently conscious of mass culture, extends this idea of the self as a kind of borrowed tissue, full of other people’s germs. Among modern and postmodern writers, Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace have all employed and impaled cliché in their work. Paul Auster is probably America’s best-known postmodern novelist; his “New York Trilogy” must have been read by thousands who do not usually read avant-garde fiction. Auster clearly shares this engagement with mediation and borrowedness—hence, his cinematic plots and rather bogus dialogue—and yet he does nothing with cliché except use it.

This is bewildering, on its face, but then Auster is a peculiar kind of postmodernist. Or is he a postmodernist at all? Eighty per cent of a typical Auster novel proceeds in a manner indistinguishable from American realism; the remaining twenty per cent does a kind of postmodern surgery on the eighty per cent, often casting doubt on the veracity of the plot. Nashe, in “The Music of Chance” (1990), sounds as if he had sprung from a Raymond Carver story (although Carver would have written more interesting prose):

He drove for seven straight hours, paused momentarily to fill up the tank with gas, and then continued for another six hours until exhaustion finally got the better of him. He was in north-central Wyoming by then, and dawn was just beginning to lift over the horizon. He checked into a motel, slept solidly for eight or nine hours, and then walked over to the diner next door and put away a meal of steak and eggs from the twenty-four-hour breakfast menu. By late afternoon, he was back in the car, and once again he drove clear through the night, not stopping until he had gone halfway through New Mexico.

One reads Auster’s novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the Times once called “all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller.” There are no semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or syntactical challenges. The books fairly hum along. The reason Auster is not a realist writer, of course, is that his larger narrative games are anti-realist or surrealist. In “The Music of Chance,” Nashe inherits money from his father, and goes on the road. Eventually, he meets a professional poker player named Jack Pozzi (the name suggestive of “jackpot,” and also of Pozzo from “Waiting for Godot”): “It was one of those random, accidental encounters that seem to materialize out of thin air.” For no very credible reason, Nashe decides to tag along with Pozzi: “It was as if he finally had no part in what was about to happen to him.” The pair end up in the Pennsylvania mansion of two eccentric millionaires, Flower and Stone. Pozzi loses all Nashe’s money in a poker game, and the unfortunate duo suddenly owe ten thousand dollars to Flower and Stone, who exact repayment by putting them to work on their estate: their job will be to build, by hand, a huge wall in a field. A trailer is prepared for their quarters. The estate has become a Sisyphean prison yard for Nashe and Pozzi, with Flower and Stone as unreachable gods (Flower’s name perhaps gesturing at God’s soft side, Stone’s at punishment). Nashe gnashes his teeth in this pastoral hell.

In what is probably Auster’s best novel, “The Book of Illusions” (2002), David Zimmer, a professor of literature, holes up in Vermont, where he mourns the death of his wife and two sons in a plane crash. “For several months, I lived in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity,” he says. By chance, he sees a silent film starring Hector Mann, a brilliant actor who disappeared in 1929, and who, it was thought, never made another film. Zimmer decides to write a book about Mann, and the best part of the novel is Auster’s painstaking and vivid fictional re-creation of the career of a silent-movie actor of the nineteen-twenties. But the story soon hurtles into absurdity. After his book on Hector Mann is published, Zimmer receives a letter from Mann’s wife, Frieda: Mann is alive, though dying, in New Mexico; Zimmer must come at once. He does nothing about the letter, and one evening a strange woman named Alma arrives at Zimmer’s house. She orders him, at gunpoint, to the New Mexico ranch. Second-rate dialogue is copiously exchanged. “I’m not your friend. . . . You’re a phantom who wandered in from the night, and now I want you to go back out there and leave me alone,” Zimmer tells Alma, in one of those ritual moments of temporary resistance we know so well from bad movies. (“Well, buddy, you can count me out of this particular bank heist.”)

Alma explains to Zimmer that Hector Mann disappeared in order to hide the traces of a murder: Mann’s fiancée accidentally shot his jealous girlfriend. The rest of the book speeds along like something written by a hipper John Irving: Zimmer goes to the ranch with the mysterious Alma; meets Hector Mann, who dies almost immediately; Alma kills Hector’s wife, and then commits suicide. And at the end, making good on many helpful suggestions throughout the book, we are encouraged to believe that David Zimmer invented everything we have just read: it was the fiction he needed to raise himself from the near-death of his mourning.

What is problematic about these books is not their postmodern skepticism about the stability of the narrative, which is standard-issue fare, but the gravity and the emotional logic that Auster tries to extract from the “realist” side of his stories. Auster is always at his most solemn at those moments in his books which are least plausible and most ragingly unaffecting. One never really believes in Nashe’s bleak solitude, or in David Zimmer’s alcoholic grief. In “City of Glass” (1985), Quinn, the protagonist, decides to impersonate a private investigator (who happens to be named Paul Auster). Though he is a solitary writer, and has never done any detective work before, he takes on a case that involves protecting a young man from a potentially violent and insane father, whom he must shadow. He pursues this lunatic father with desperate fervor throughout the book. The motive? Quinn’s loss of his wife and son, who died several years before the book begins. Quinn, Auster writes,

wanted to be there to stop him. He knew he could not bring his own son back to life, but at least he could prevent another from dying. It had suddenly become possible to do this, and standing there on the street now, the idea of what lay before him loomed up like a terrible dream.

This is the kind of balsa-wood backstory that is knocked into Hollywood plots every day. Now, a certain kind of comic postmodernist could play such stuff for laughs, much as, say, the early postmodern Irish writer Flann O’Brien brilliantly undermines all conventional motive and consequence in his hilarious novel “The Third Policeman.” But Auster, unlike the reader, seems to believe in the actuality of his characters’ motives. He is only ever unwittingly funny. In “The Book of Illusions,” an excruciating example of this unintended comedy occurs when Alma tells David Zimmer that Hector Mann and Frieda had a son, Tad, who died as a small child. “Imagine the effect it had on them,” she says. Zimmer, who lost his two sons, Marco and Todd, in the plane crash that also killed his wife, says, “I know what you’re talking about. No mental gymnastics required to understand the situation. Tad and Todd. It can’t get any closer than that, can it?” The reader has the urge to blow a Flann O’Brien-size raspberry. Zimmer sounds less like a grieving father than like a canny deconstructionist leading a graduate seminar: two dead sons, one named Tad and the other Todd! But Auster is death-suited and thin-lipped here: he wants both the emotional credibility of conventional realism and a frisson of postmodern wordplay (a single vowel separates the names, and Tod is German for “death”).

What Auster often gets instead is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism. The two weaknesses are related. Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves; they hound the next revelation. Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.) Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough. This is the crevasse that divides Auster from novelists like José Saramago, or the Philip Roth of “The Ghost Writer.” Saramago’s realism is braced with skepticism, so his skepticism feels real. Roth’s narrative games emerge naturally from his consideration of ordinary human ironies and comedies; they do not start life as allegories about the relativity of mimesis, though they may become them. Saramago and Roth both assemble and disassemble their stories in ways that seem fundamentally grave. Auster, despite all the games, is the least ironic of contemporary writers. Read Adam Walker’s profession of mortification in “Invisible”:

After torturing myself for close to a week, I finally found the courage to call my sister again, and when I heard myself spewing out the whole sordid business to Gwyn over the course of our two-hour conversation, I realized that I didn’t have a choice. I had to step forward. If I didn’t talk to the police, I would lose all respect for myself, and the shame of it would go on haunting me for the rest of my life.

A narrator who trades in such banalities is difficult to credit, and the writer who lends him those words seems uninterested in persuading us that they mean anything. But, once again, here is an Auster character keen to urge on us, in words of air, the gravity of his motives, the depths of his anguish: “This failure to act is far and away the most reprehensible thing I have ever done, the low point in my career as a human being.” This shame supposedly determines the course of Walker’s life. Later in the year, in Paris, he runs into Born again, and hatches a plan for revenge. Walker “has never been a vengeful person, has never actively sought to hurt anyone, but Born is in a different category, Born is a killer, Born deserves to be punished, and for the first time in his life Walker is out for blood.”

You will notice that the novel’s narration has switched from first person to third person—and that the novel’s prose has not adjusted its awfulness. The switch in narration is less complex than it seems. An Austerian framing device is at work. Walker’s account of how he met Born in 1967 (the first section of the novel) is revealed, in the novel’s second section, to be a manuscript, which he has been working on as an adult, and which he has sent to his old Columbia friend James Freeman, now a well-known writer. Freeman is the only person in possession of this text, which recounts Walker’s youthful adventures in New York and Paris, and which moves among first-, second-, and third-person narration. The second section of Walker’s narrative contains a scandalous (and quite touching) account of an incestuous affair that Walker carried on with his sister, Gwyn, in the summer of 1967, just before he left for Paris. Auster’s writing stirs in this passage about taboo-breaking, almost as if the radicalism of the content challenged something in his prose: the story has a vividness and pathos largely absent from the rest of the book.

Later in the novel, after the death of Adam Walker, James Freeman sends Walker’s manuscript to Gwyn, who denies the incest. The reader is free to infer that Walker invented the relationship with his sister, in part as a way of compensating for the grief of his lost brother. Perhaps he also invented Born’s murder of Cedric Williams, and for similar reasons. Unwisely, the novel ends by returning to its least plausible character, Rudolf Born, who is glimpsed, in the present day, now fat and old, and living on a Caribbean island, looked after by servants in expensive isolation, like Dr. No gone to seed. The vitality of the passage about Adam Walker’s possible incest is squeezed at either end by the flamboyantly unreal Born.

The classic formulations of postmodernism, by philosophers and theorists like Maurice Blanchot and Ihab Hassan, emphasize the way that contemporary language abuts silence. For Blanchot, as indeed for Beckett, language is always announcing its invalidity. Texts stutter and fragment, shred themselves around a void. Perhaps the strangest element of Auster’s reputation as an American postmodernist is that his language never registers this kind of absence at the level of the sentence. The void is all too speakable in Auster’s work. The pleasing, slightly facile books come out almost every year, as tidy and punctual as postage stamps, and the applauding reviewers line up like eager stamp collectors to get the latest issue. Peter Aaron, the narrator of “Leviathan,” whose prose is so pressureless, claims that “I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me.” Not enough silence, alas.♦

Get Gay Marriage Off the Ballot - Linda Hirshman

2009-11-04T15:20:00.009+01:00

The Maine gay-marriage initiative went down to defeat Tuesday. But the real tragedy is that it should never have been put to a vote in the first place.

I had hoped gay marriage would win out in Maine. I even gave them a little money (thank you to gay friends for a dinner). So when it lost, I was sorry that the crucial percentage of the Maine voters saw fit to weigh in against their fellow citizens’ ability to conduct their most intimate and meaningful human relationships on a level playing field with everyone else in the state.

But winning or losing makes no difference to the real question: what in the world was this issue doing in a referendum anyway? Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing that James Madison invented the life-tenured federal judiciary to decide?

Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing that James Madison invented the life-tenured federal judiciary to decide?

Recently, a bunch of legal scholars and influential commentators representing themselves as liberals, have suggested that it’s not. The federal courts should just bow out, they say, of deciding things like gay marriage (and abortion rights). (Little-known fact: the Bow Out movement started with a suggestion that the Supreme Court had made a mistake when it integrated the schools. Imagine what the law would look like if the Brown court had waited until a majority of states were ready to pass the Civil Rights Acts.) Painful as it is to them, as sincere supporters of abortion rights/gay marriage/your issue here, these wise ones think the federal courts should follow the election returns. Only when a majority of states have legalized something should the federal courts find that it was a fundamental constitutional right all along.

Look at the damage, the law professors say, from the Court’s “premature” decision to protect women’s right to abortion in 1973. Why, bands of protesters are still showing up at the Supreme Court building with pictures of fetuses. How much better it would have been, they argue, to fight these grinding, state- by-state battles to protect women’s choices, than to have legal abortion protected as a matter of equality and privacy for 36 years.

What these academic treatises ignore is the concern that Madison and others had that what they called the tyranny of the majority was legitimate. A majority, Madison predicted, often whipped up by demagogues, would oppress a helpless minority, a group so naturally small it could never hope to protect itself at the polls alone—using the government to deprive them of those aspects of life fundamental to a free society. No kidding.

The Framers set up systems to protect the minority–legislators would come from different constituencies, voters selecting representatives would have different issues before them when they voted, laws would require the executive to sign off, too. The Framers wrote down a list of rights, like freedom of assembly and religion, which could not be bargained away by any legislature. Soon after the founding, the federal courts took on the constitutional role of saying what that document required. After the Civil War, the Constitutional scheme was expanded to require equality before the law and to apply to the states specifically. The constitutions of the states modeled the state governments roughly along the lines of the federal example, including an independent judiciary to enforce the state constitution.

When confronted with gay marriage, a record number of states, red and blue, stood that carefully constructed system on its head. In the Maine gay marriage campaign, the popularly elected branches were invoked, when, in a matter of great human importance and intimacy, gay marriage should have been a matter of fundamental rights for the courts from the beginning. The odds did not look good from the outset: although three states have extended marriage to same sex couples by legislation, twenty-seven have banned it. However, protected by their terms and the presence of other issues in most elections, the Maine legislators took the electoral chance of enacting gay marriage. At that point, one might conclude, the Madisonian system was working pretty well.

Unsatisfied with this product of representative government, Maine law then allowed the reconsideration of the legislative decision by plebiscite, where people just go to the polls and vote on the one oppressive opportunity themselves, rather than electing representatives with many interests to balance. Unmodified by the diversity of interests, they got to vote on their litmus test issue alone.

Although Maine was the first to reconsider a legislative outcome by veto referendum, twenty-six states have amended their constitutions to forbid same sex marriage, or other unions. Most of those initiatives never even saw the legislature, being started by petitions directly. At this point, Maine has joined the many other communities that have taken the opportunity to prove the wisdom of Madison’s scheme.

That gay marriage has to run this gauntlet is not an accident. Before the Bow Out movement, most big social change claims made their way to the federal courts without this huge windup of state-by-state legislative efforts, which then alerted the opposition to the social change that was coming. More importantly, a thoroughly organized, heavily funded conservative movement is now securely ensconced on the political stage and has seen its tyrannical opportunity in the majoritarian vehicle of the referendum. The combination has pulled the American political system in a radical new direction the Founders actively opposed.

The Supreme Court has yet to rule that gay marriage is either a matter of fundamental right or simple equality. They will have a chance to do that, as the various lawsuits generated by this constitutionally repulsive procedure make their way up in the next few years. But one thing the experience with same sex marriage should make clear. Whether we like the outcome or not, the last thing the court should do, in deciding that question, is follow the election returns.

Linda Hirshman is a retired professor of philosophy. She is the author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, and a columnist at DoubleX.com. She is writing a book about the gay revolution.

From: The Daily Beast, November 4, 2009.

My Living Will - by Paul Rudnick

2005-04-25T00:00:00.005+02:00

1. If I should remain in a persistent vegetative state for more than fifteen years, I would like someone to turn off the TV.

2. If I remain motionless for an extended period and utter only guttural, meaningless sounds, I would like a Guggenheim.

3. If I am unable to recognize or interact with friends or family members, I still expect gifts.

4. If I am unable to feed, clean, or dress myself, I would like to be referred to as “Mr. Trump.”

5. Do not resuscitate me before noon.

6. If I do not respond to pinches, pinpricks, rubber mallets, or other medical stimuli, please stop laughing.

7. If I no longer respond to loved ones’ attempts at communication, ask them about our last car trip.

8. Once I am allowed to die a painless and peaceful death, I would like my organs donated to whoever can catch them.

9. If my death is particularly dramatic, I would like to be played by Hilary Swank, for a slam dunk.

10. If there is any family dispute over my medical condition, it must be settled with a dreidel.

11. Even if I remain in a persistent vegetative state for more than fifteen years, that still doesn’t mean bangs.

12. If my doctor pronounces me brain-dead, I would like to see the new Ashton Kutcher movie.

13. If I remain unconscious during a painful, lingering illness, I would like the following life lessons to be published in a book entitled “Tuesdays with Paul”:

i. Treasure every moment.
ii. Love everyone.
iii. If you bought this in hardcover, you’re an idiot.

14. I do not wish to be kept alive by any machine that has a “Popcorn” setting.

15. I would like to die at home, surrounded by my attorneys.

16. If my loved ones insist that the cost of my medical care has become an impossible burden, show them a Polaroid of their “beach shack.”

17. In lieu of flowers or donations, I would prefer rioting.

18. I would like my entire estate to become the property of my cat, Fluffy, who said, “He wouldn’t want to live like this, with that zit.”

19. Assume that, even in a coma, I can still hear discussions about my apartment.

20. If there is any talk of canonizing me, please remember that I have often held the elevator for people who were still getting their mail, that I have twice offered a cab to a woman in a fur coat even though I was totally there first, and that I always waited to make derogatory comments until after the couple with the double stroller was a block away.

21. In the event of an open coffin, I would like smoky evening eyes.

22. At my memorial service, I would like my clergyman to begin his eulogy with the words “I suppose, in a way, we all killed him.”

The New Yorker
April 25, 2005

Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens - Ward Churchill

2005-01-31T12:00:00.008+01:00

In the red states, people like the governor of Colorado can’t talk about Ward Churchill without frothing at the mouth like mad dogs, which is more entertainment than a person ought to be allowed to have for free. In a remarkable proof of the inability of the American “Right” to keep anything complicated in their little heads, you’d think Churchill’s essay (and the related book) were exactly four syllables long. (By now you probably know which four.) But if you look up the term “out of context” in the dictionary, it points you to this example. The essay is long and Churchill pulls no punches. “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” is a brilliant piece of work.

Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
by Ward Churchill

When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously—and quite charitably, all things considered—replied that it was merely a case of “chickens coming home to roost.”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens—along with some half-million dead Iraqi children—came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable—in fact, widely predicted—result of the 1991 US “surgical” bombing of their country’s water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other “infrastructural” targets upon which Iraq’s civilian population depends for its very survival.

If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough—and it should be noted that this sort of “aerial warfare” constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of “civilized” behavior—the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims’ ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the lives of even their toddlers.

All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered—are still suffering—a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.

The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41st “freedom-loving” father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43rd: “The world must learn that what we say, goes,” intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere. How Old George conveyed his message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.

In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 “towel-heads” and “camel jockeys”—or was it “sand niggers” that week?—in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance. It was a performance worthy of the nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany’s “innocent civilians” until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.

There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, bur for what they had allowed—nay, empowered—their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.

If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans. And the price exacted from the Germans for the faultiness of their moral fiber was truly ghastly. Returning now to the children, and to the effects of the post-Gulf War embargo—continued bull force by Bush the Elder’s successors in the Clinton administration as a gesture of its “resolve” to finalize what George himself had dubbed the “New World Order” of American military/economic domination—it should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests against US policy.

One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halladay, repeatedly denounced what was happening as “a systematic program ... of deliberate genocide.” His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was “unaware” of them. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halladay’s assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his “allegations,” she calmly announced that she’d decided it was “worth the price” to see that U.S. objectives were achieved.

The Politics of a Perpetrator Population As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns.. There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting “Jeremy” and “Ellington” to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little “Tiffany” an “Ashley” had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays—for “our kids,” no less—as an all-absorbing point of political focus.

In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing “moral witness” as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable.

Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the “resistance” expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as “a principle of moral virtue” that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of “challenging” the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these “dissidents,” in fact, that they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage against suffering such retaliatory “violence” as having their windows broken by persons less “enlightened”—or perhaps more outraged—than the self-anointed “peacekeepers.”

Property before people, it seems—or at least the equation of property to people—is a value by no means restricted to America’s boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or any of the swarm of comfort zone “pacifists” queuing up to condemn the black block after it ever so slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.

Small wonder, all-in-all, that people elsewhere in the world—the Mideast, for instance—began to wonder where, exactly, aside from the streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America’s purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.

The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of delusions engendered by sheer vanity and self-absorption. So, too, were the implications in terms of anything changing, out there, in America’s free-fire zones.

Tellingly, it was at precisely this point—with the genocide in Iraq officially admitted and a public response demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans, including most of those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it—that the combat teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on September 11 began to infiltrate the United States.

Meet the “Terrorists” Of the men who came, there are a few things demanding to be said in the face of the unending torrent of disinformational drivel unleashed by George Junior and the corporate “news” media immediately following their successful operation on September 11.

They did not, for starters, “initiate” a war with the US, much less commit “the first acts of war of the new millennium.”

A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less continuously by the “Christian West”—now proudly emblematized by the United States—against the “Islamic East” since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago. More recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel’s dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered “Desert Shield” in 1990, or at any of several points in between. Any way you slice it, however, if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war—and they can—then the same is true of every US “overflight’ of Iraqi territory since day one. The first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course.

That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint.

They did not license themselves to “target innocent civilians.”

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire—the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved—and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance”—a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore”—counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in—and in many cases excelling at—it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.

The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not “cowards.” That distinction properly belongs to the “firm-jawed lads” who delighted in flying stealth aircraft through the undefended airspace of Baghdad, dropping payload after payload of bombs on anyone unfortunate enough to be below—including tens of thousands of genuinely innocent civilians—while themselves incurring all the risk one might expect during a visit to the local video arcade. Still more, the word describes all those “fighting men and women” who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the Persian Gulf, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods filled with random human beings. Whatever else can be said of them, the men who struck on September 11 manifested the courage of their convictions, willingly expending their own lives in attaining their objectives.

Nor were they “fanatics” devoted to “Islamic fundamentalism.”

One might rightly describe their actions as “desperate.” Feelings of desperation, however, are a perfectly reasonable—one is tempted to say “normal”—emotional response among persons confronted by the mass murder of their children, particularly when it appears that nobody else really gives a damn (ask a Jewish survivor about this one, or, even more poignantly, for all the attention paid them, a Gypsy).

That desperate circumstances generate desperate responses is no mysterious or irrational principle, of the sort motivating fanatics. Less is it one peculiar to Islam. Indeed, even the FBI’s investigative reports on the combat teams’ activities during the months leading up to September 11 make it clear that the members were not fundamentalist Muslims. Rather, it’s pretty obvious at this point that they were secular activists—soldiers, really—who, while undoubtedly enjoying cordial relations with the clerics of their countries, were motivated far more by the grisly realities of the U.S. war against them than by a set of religious beliefs.

And still less were they/their acts “insane.”

Insanity is a condition readily associable with the very American idea that one—or one’s country—holds what amounts to a “divine right” to commit genocide, and thus to forever do so with impunity. The term might also be reasonably applied to anyone suffering genocide without attempting in some material way to bring the process to a halt. Sanity itself, in this frame of reference, might be defined by a willingness to try and destroy the perpetrators and/or the sources of their ability to commit their crimes. (Shall we now discuss the US “strategic bombing campaign” against Germany during World War II, and the mental health of those involved in it?)

Which takes us to official characterizations of the combat teams as an embodiment of “evil.”

Evil—for those inclined to embrace the banality of such a concept—was perfectly incarnated in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba the Hutt, blandly spewing the news that she’d imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of Iraq. Evil was to be heard in that great American hero “Stormin’ Norman” Schwartzkopf’s utterly dehumanizing dismissal of their systematic torture and annihilation as mere “collateral damage.” Evil, moreover, is a term appropriate to describing the mentality of a public that finds such perspectives and the policies attending them acceptable, or even momentarily tolerable.

Had it not been for these evils, the counterattacks of September 11 would never have occurred. And unless “the world is rid of such evil,” to lift a line from George Junior, September 11 may well end up looking like a lark.

There is no reason, after all, to believe that the teams deployed in the assaults on the WTC and the Pentagon were the only such, that the others are composed of “Arabic-looking individuals”—America’s indiscriminately lethal arrogance and psychotic sense of self-entitlement have long since given the great majority of the world’s peoples ample cause to be at war with it—or that they are in any way dependent upon the seizure of civilian airliners to complete their missions.

To the contrary, there is every reason to expect that there are many other teams in place, tasked to employ altogether different tactics in executing operational plans at least as well-crafted as those evident on September 11, and very well equipped for their jobs. This is to say that, since the assaults on the WTC and Pentagon were act of war—not “terrorist incidents”—they must be understood as components in a much broader strategy designed to achieve specific results. From this, it can only be adduced that there are plenty of other components ready to go, and that they will be used, should this become necessary in the eyes of the strategists. It also seems a safe bet that each component is calibrated to inflict damage at a level incrementally higher than the one before (during the 1960s, the Johnson administration employed a similar policy against Vietnam, referred to as “escalation”).

Since implementation of the overall plan began with the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it takes no rocket scientist to decipher what is likely to happen next, should the U.S. attempt a response of the inexcusable variety to which it has long entitled itself.

About Those Boys (and Girls) in the Bureau There’s another matter begging for comment at this point. The idea that the FBI’s “counterterrorism task forces” can do a thing to prevent what will happen is yet another dimension of America’s delusional pathology.. The fact is that, for all its publicly-financed “image-building” exercises, the Bureau has never shown the least aptitude for anything of the sort.

Oh, yeah, FBI counterintelligence personnel have proven quite adept at framing anarchists, communists and Black Panthers, sometimes murdering them in their beds or the electric chair. The Bureau’s SWAT units have displayed their ability to combat child abuse in Waco by burning babies alive, and its vaunted Crime Lab has been shown to pad its “crime-fighting’ statistics by fabricating evidence against many an alleged car thief. But actual “heavy-duty bad guys” of the sort at issue now? This isn’t a Bruce Willis/Chuck Norris/Sly Stallone movie, after all.. And J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t get to approve either the script or the casting.

The number of spies, saboteurs and bona fide terrorists apprehended, or even detected by the FBI in the course of its long and slimy history could be counted on one’s fingers and toes. On occasion, its agents have even turned out to be the spies, and, in many instances, the terrorists as well.

To be fair once again, if the Bureau functions as at best a carnival of clowns where its “domestic security responsibilities” are concerned, this is because—regardless of official hype—it has none. It is now, as it’s always been, the national political police force, and instrument created and perfected to ensure that all Americans, not just the consenting mass, are “free” to do exactly as they’re told.

The FBI and “cooperating agencies” can be thus relied upon to set about “protecting freedom” by destroying whatever rights and liberties were left to U.S. citizens before September 11 (in fact, they’ve already received authorization to begin). Sheeplike, the great majority of Americans can also be counted upon to bleat their approval, at least in the short run, believing as they always do that the nasty implications of what they’re doing will pertain only to others.

Oh Yeah, and “The Company,” Too

A possibly even sicker joke is the notion, suddenly in vogue, that the CIA will be able to pinpoint “terrorist threats,” “rooting out their infrastructure” where it exists and/or “terminating” it before it can materialize, if only it’s allowed to beef up its “human intelligence gathering capacity” in an unrestrained manner (including full-bore operations inside the US, of course).

Yeah. Right.

Since America has a collective attention-span of about 15 minutes, a little refresher seems in order: “The Company” had something like a quarter-million people serving as “intelligence assets” by feeding it information in Vietnam in 1968, and it couldn’t even predict the Tet Offensive. God knows how many spies it was fielding against the USSR at the height of Ronald Reagan’s version of the Cold War, and it was still caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. As to destroying “terrorist infrastructures,” one would do well to remember Operation Phoenix, another product of its open season in Vietnam. In that one, the CIA enlisted elite US units like the Navy Seals and Army Special Forces, as well as those of friendly countries—the south Vietnamese Rangers, for example, and Australian SAS—to run around “neutralizing” folks targeted by The Company’s legion of snitches as “guerrillas” (as those now known as “terrorists” were then called).

Sound familiar?

Upwards of 40,000 people—mostly bystanders, as it turns out—were murdered by Phoenix hit teams before the guerrillas, stronger than ever, ran the US and its collaborators out of their country altogether. And these are the guys who are gonna save the day, if unleashed to do their thing in North America?

The net impact of all this “counterterrorism” activity upon the combat teams’ ability to do what they came to do, of course, will be nil.

Instead, it’s likely to make it easier for them to operate (it’s worked that way in places like Northern Ireland). And, since denying Americans the luxury of reaping the benefits of genocide in comfort was self-evidently a key objective of the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it can be stated unequivocally that a more overt display of the police state mentality already pervading this country simply confirms the magnitude of their victory.

On Matters of Proportion and Intent As things stand, including the 1993 detonation at the WTC, “Arab terrorists” have responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq with a total of four assaults by explosives inside the US. That’s about 1% of the 50,000 bombs the Pentagon announced were rained on Baghdad alone during the Gulf War (add in Oklahoma City and you’ll get something nearer an actual 1%).

They’ve managed in the process to kill about 5,000 Americans, or roughly 1% of the dead Iraqi children (the percentage is far smaller if you factor in the killing of adult Iraqi civilians, not to mention troops butchered as/after they’d surrendered and/or after the “war-ending” ceasefire had been announced).

In terms undoubtedly more meaningful to the property/profit-minded American mainstream, they’ve knocked down a half-dozen buildings—albeit some very well-chosen ones—as opposed to the “strategic devastation” visited upon the whole of Iraq, and punched a $100 billion hole in the earnings outlook of major corporate shareholders, as opposed to the U.S. obliteration of Iraq’s entire economy.

With that, they’ve given Americans a tiny dose of their own medicine.. This might be seen as merely a matter of “vengeance” or “retribution,” and, unquestionably, America has earned it, even if it were to add up only to something so ultimately petty.

The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage—the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory—they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.

Were this the intent of those who’ve entered the US to wage war against it, it would remain no less true that America and Americans were only receiving the bill for what they’d already done. Payback, as they say, can be a real motherfucker (ask the Germans). There is, however, no reason to believe that retributive parity is necessarily an item on the agenda of those who planned the WTC/Pentagon operation. If it were, given the virtual certainty that they possessed the capacity to have inflicted far more damage than they did, there would be a lot more American bodies lying about right now.

Hence, it can be concluded that ravings carried by the “news” media since September 11 have contained at least one grain of truth: The peoples of the Mideast “aren’t like” Americans, not least because they don’t “value life’ in the same way. By this, it should be understood that Middle-Easterners, unlike Americans, have no history of exterminating others purely for profit, or on the basis of racial animus. Thus, we can appreciate the fact that they value life—all lives, not just their own—far more highly than do their U.S. counterparts.

The Makings of a Humanitarian Strategy In sum one can discern a certain optimism—it might even be call humanitarianism—imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.

Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name—indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it—mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

Now they do.

That was the “medicinal” aspect of the attacks.

To all appearances, the idea is now to give the tonic a little time to take effect, jolting Americans into the realization that the sort of pain they’re now experiencing first-hand is no different from—or the least bit more excruciating than—that which they’ve been so cavalier in causing others, and thus to respond appropriately.

More bluntly, the hope was—and maybe still is—that Americans, stripped of their presumed immunity from incurring any real consequences for their behavior, would comprehend and act upon a formulation as uncomplicated as “stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe.”

Either way, it’s a kind of “reality therapy” approach, designed to afford the American people a chance to finally “do the right thing” on their own, without further coaxing.

Were the opportunity acted upon in some reasonably good faith fashion—a sufficiently large number of Americans rising up and doing whatever is necessary to force an immediate lifting of the sanctions on Iraq, for instance, or maybe hanging a few of America’s abundant supply of major war criminals (Henry Kissinger comes quickly to mind, as do Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton and George the Elder)—there is every reason to expect that military operations against the US on its domestic front would be immediately suspended.

Whether they would remain so would of course be contingent upon follow-up. By that, it may be assumed that American acceptance of onsite inspections by international observers to verify destruction of its weapons of mass destruction (as well as dismantlement of all facilities in which more might be manufactured), Nuremberg-style trials in which a few thousand US military/corporate personnel could be properly adjudicated and punished for their Crimes Against humanity, and payment of reparations to the array of nations/peoples whose assets the US has plundered over the years, would suffice.

Since they’ve shown no sign of being unreasonable or vindictive, it may even be anticipated that, after a suitable period of adjustment and reeducation (mainly to allow them to acquire the skills necessary to living within their means), those restored to control over their own destinies by the gallant sacrifices of the combat teams the WTC and Pentagon will eventually (re)admit Americans to the global circle of civilized societies. Stranger things have happened.

In the Alternative Unfortunately, noble as they may have been, such humanitarian aspirations were always doomed to remain unfulfilled. For it to have been otherwise, a far higher quality of character and intellect would have to prevail among average Americans than is actually the case. Perhaps the strategists underestimated the impact a couple of generations-worth of media indoctrination can produce in terms of demolishing the capacity of human beings to form coherent thoughts. Maybe they forgot to factor in the mind-numbing effects of the indoctrination passed off as education in the US. Then, again, it’s entirely possible they were aware that a decisive majority of American adults have been reduced by this point to a level much closer to the kind of immediate self-gratification entailed in Pavlovian stimulus/response patterns than anything accessible by appeals to higher logic, and still felt morally obliged to offer the dolts an option to quit while they were ahead.

What the hell? It was worth a try.

But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the dosage of medicine administered was entirely insufficient to accomplish its purpose.

Although there are undoubtedly exceptions, Americans for the most part still don’t get it.

Already, they’ve desecrated the temporary tomb of those killed in the WTC, staging a veritable pep rally atop the mangled remains of those they profess to honor, treating the whole affair as if it were some bizarre breed of contact sport. And, of course, there are the inevitable pom-poms shaped like American flags, the school colors worn as little red-white-and-blue ribbons affixed to labels, sportscasters in the form of “counterterrorism experts” drooling mindless color commentary during the pregame warm-up.

Refusing the realization that the world has suddenly shifted its axis, and that they are therefore no longer “in charge,” they have by-and-large reverted instantly to type, working themselves into their usual bloodlust on the now obsolete premise that the bloodletting will “naturally” occur elsewhere and to someone else.

”Patriotism,” a wise man once observed, “is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

And the braided, he might of added.

Braided Scoundrel-in-Chief, George Junior, lacking even the sense to be careful what he wished for, has teamed up with a gaggle of fundamentalist Christian clerics like Billy Graham to proclaim a “New Crusade” called “Infinite Justice” aimed at “ridding the world of evil.”

One could easily make light of such rhetoric, remarking upon how unseemly it is for a son to threaten his father in such fashion—or a president to so publicly contemplate the murder/suicide of himself and his cabinet—but the matter is deadly serious.

They are preparing once again to sally forth for the purpose of roasting brown-skinned children by the scores of thousands. Already, the B-1 bombers and the aircraft carriers and the missile frigates are en route, the airborne divisions are gearing up to go.

To where? Afghanistan?

The Sudan?

Iraq, again (or still)?

How about Grenada (that was fun)?

Any of them or all. It doesn’t matter.

The desire to pummel the helpless runs rabid as ever.

Only, this time it’s different.

The time the helpless aren’t, or at least are not so helpless as they were.

This time, somewhere, perhaps in an Afghani mountain cave, possibly in a Brooklyn basement, maybe another local altogether—but somewhere, all the same—there’s a grim-visaged (wo)man wearing a Clint Eastwood smile.

”Go ahead, punks,” s/he’s saying, “Make my day.”

And when they do, when they launch these airstrikes abroad—or may a little later; it will be at a time conforming to the “terrorists”‘ own schedule, and at a place of their choosing—the next more intensive dose of medicine administered here “at home.”

Of what will it consist this time? Anthrax? Mustard gas? Sarin? A tactical nuclear device?

That, too, is their choice to make.

Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.

”You’ve got to learn, “ the line went, “that when you push people around, some people push back.”

As they should.

As they must.

And as they undoubtedly will.

There is justice in such symmetry.

ADDENDUM

The preceding was a “first take” reading, more a stream-of-consciousness interpretive reaction to the September 11 counterattack than a finished piece on the topic. Hence, I’ll readily admit that I’ve been far less than thorough, and quite likely wrong about a number of things.

For instance, it may not have been (only) the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins.

Or maybe it was some or all of the at least 3.2 million Indochinese who perished as a result of America’s sustained and genocidal assault on Southeast Asia (1959-1975), not to mention the millions more who’ve died because of the sanctions imposed thereafter.

Perhaps there were a few of the Korean civilians massacred by US troops at places like No Gun Ri during the early ‘50s, or the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians ruthlessly incinerated in the ghastly fire raids of World War II (only at Dresden did America bomb Germany in a similar manner).

And, of course, it could have been those vaporized in the militarily pointless nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are others, as well, a vast and silent queue of faceless victims, stretching from the million-odd Filipinos slaughtered during America’s “Indian War” in their islands at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the real Indians, America’s own, massacred wholesale at places like Horseshoe Bend and the Bad Axe, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, the Washita, Bear River, and the Marias.

Was it those who expired along the Cherokee Trial of Tears of the Long Walk of the Navajo?

Those murdered by smallpox at Fort Clark in 1836?

Starved to death in the concentration camp at Bosque Redondo during the 1860s?

Maybe those native people claimed for scalp bounty in all 48 of the continental US states? Or the Raritans whose severed heads were kicked for sport along the streets of what was then called New Amsterdam, at the very site where the WTC once stood?

One hears, too, the whispers of those lost on the Middle Passage, and of those whose very flesh was sold in the slave market outside the human kennel from whence Wall Street takes its name. And of coolie laborers, imported by the gross-dozen to lay the tracks of empire across scorching desert sands, none of them allotted “a Chinaman’s chance” of surviving.

The list is too long, too awful to go on.

No matter what its eventual fate, America will have gotten off very, very cheap.

The full measure of its guilt can never be fully balanced or atoned for.

**********************
Ward Churchill (Keetoowah Band Cherokee) is one of the most outspoken of Native American activists. In his lectures and numerous published works, he explores the themes of genocide in the Americas, historical and legal (re)interpretation of conquest and colonization, literary and cinematic criticism, and indigenist alternatives to the status quo. Churchill is a Professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of American Indian Studies. He is also a past national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. His books include Agents of Repression, Fantasies of the Master Race, From a Native Son and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas.

**********************

Ward Churchill Responds to Criticism of“Some People Push Back”

In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.

* The piece circulating on the internet was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Most of the book is a detailed chronology of U.S. military interventions since 1776 and U.S. violations of international law since World War II. My point is that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.

* I am not a “defender”of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people “should” engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.”

* This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world. My feelings are reflected in Dr. King’s April 1967 Riverside speech, where, when asked about the wave of urban rebellions in U.S. cities, he said, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed . . . without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

* In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that “we” had decided it was “worth the cost.” I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.

* Finally, I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as “Nazis.” What I said was that the “technocrats of empire” working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of “little Eichmanns.” Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.

* It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American “command and control infrastructure” in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a “legitimate” target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than “collateral damage.” If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these “standards” when the are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.

* It should be emphasized that I applied the “little Eichmanns” characterization only to those described as “technicians.” Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack. According to Pentagon logic, were simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that’s my point. It’s no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.

* The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9-1-1-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the “Good Germans” of the 1930s and ‘40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else.

* These points are clearly stated and documented in my book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which recently won Honorary Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award. for best writing on human rights. Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today’s world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country.

Ward Churchill Boulder, Colorado January 31, 2005

Tim's Last Kill - Janet Burroway

2004-07-02T00:00:00.007+02:00

As a child Tim Eysselinck was obsessed with toy soldiers, John Wayne and guns. As an adult he became a soldier, a keen hunter and toured the world clearing mines. Then he shot himself dead after returning from Iraq. His mother Janet Burroway reflects on the life of “a fiercely honourable boy.”

____________

I have today cancelled the subscription of my son Timothy Alan Eysselinck to American Rifleman, and removed his name from the National Rifle Association mailing lists, lobbying efforts, fund solicitations, and so forth. Tim has been a lifetime member of the NRA, a registered Republican, an avid hunter of both small and big game, a ranger and a captain in the army, and a civilian contractor for humanitarian de-mining. Because he was deployed or employed all over the world, his NRA mail still comes to the house in Tallahassee where he spent part of his childhood and his adolescence, but as he shot and killed himself on April 23, the messages are no longer received.

I have been looking over the most recent issue of Rifleman, trying to grasp why a fiercely honourable boy fell in love with objects manufactured to destroy, and why such boys continue to believe that such objects foster integrity and peace. But my mind is not adequate to the task, and the magazine is not intended to explain to the unconverted.

We came to England when Tim was 15 months old, I to teach at the University of Sussex and his father to direct the Gardner Centre for the Arts in Brighton.

I have a black-and-white snapshot of Tim and his little brother Alex, both of them fair-haired and long-lashed, squatting in an orchard full of daffodils in the Sussex countryside where we lived until Tim was eight. I also own a colour photograph taken in the African savanna of Tim, now grown, kneeling over the carcass of a kudu, surrounded by his wiry Cameroonian guides. Now, looking at the toddler in the daffodils, I can see the clear lineaments of the hunter’s face. But squatting beside him I had no premonition of which planes, tilts, colours of that cherub head would survive.

Tim was a loving and obedient child, fascinated none the less with all things military, tactical, strategic, ballistic. He could spend hours repositioning the limbs of a plastic soldier or reproducing the patina of wear on a toy ammo belt. As a teenager he sought discipline and rigour, to the wonder of my friends.

He lit with enthusiasm for his most demanding teachers, praising their strictness. He was modest, intense, and had few but deep friendships. He was, like his brother, proud of his Scottish heritage and the grandmother who was “pure-bred McKenzie”, but of the two McKenzie mottos it was clear that Tim espoused the Celtic that translates, “All for the king,” whereas Alex and I wore the Latin badge “Luceo non uro”, meaning “light not heat”, or, “I shine not burn”.

Tim, who described himself as a fiscal conservative and social liberal, held tolerant attitudes with regard to sex, race and religion. His politics, however, emanated from a spirit of gravity rather than irony. In puberty he developed no interest in sports but read voraciously, mostly adventure novels, admired John Wayne’s acting and his politics, and more than once to my despair quoted, “My country right or wrong.”

For a period he enjoyed goading my Democrat and Labour friends with army swagger. At 18 he came home at three one morning, in tears because he could not go to defend England’s honour in the Falklands. I had to be aware of my own contradictions in his presence: a feminist charmed by his machismo, a pacifist with a temper.

We came to acknowledge that, mother and child, we could not only not share, but could not respect each other’s world views. Our task was to love each other in the absence of that respect. It was a tall order. We agreed that we did pretty well at it. And Tim was broad-minded enough to observe once, “It’s a good thing it’s you who’s the liberal, mom. If I was the parent, I wouldn’t want to let you be you the way you’ve let me be me.”

Tim took a degree in history at the University of Florida, where he was a member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, then spent four years stationed with the army in Hawaii, where he described himself as a “warrior without a war”.

He left to work for a security corporation guarding the embassies and multinationals in Cameroon, and, as a US army reserve officer in Stuttgart, was sent to Bosnia, the Republic of Congo, and then to Namibia, where he learned the skill of de-mining. In Windhoek, the Namibian capital, he married on the eve of the millennium, became a stepfather and later a father to a daughter, who is now three and a half.

In August last year, having completed a two-year humanitarian de-mining project on the Ethiopian-Eritrean border (his family spent that time in Addis Ababa), Tim was offered his choice of a desk job in Washington or a mine-clearing contract in Iraq. His wife agreed to return to Windhoek and honour his desire for a limited tour at the front.

In Baghdad, Tim headed a $7m project with eight civilian colleagues, a sniffer dog team and a crew of 90 Iraqis who, he said, were the best he had ever worked with - the most dedicated, the most disciplined. They gave him hope for the governmental handover because, Sunni, Shia and Kurd, they worked side by side in mortal danger with mutual trust.

In the “green zone” where coalition officials live and work in Baghdad, and in the field, Tim carried two pistols and a machine gun; I paid no attention to what kind or calibre. He spent his days blowing things up - some mines, but more often unexploded ordnance from US cluster bombs - to clear building sites for housing and schools and, in one instance, a soccer field.

In January my son came to Tallahassee for a day, en route from Namibia back to Baghdad by way of a de-mining conference in Tampa. He was gorgeous in Iraqi guise - tanned, bearded, and with a full head of hair in place of his usual crewcut; my husband Peter said that I fell in love with him all over again. The three of us shared the irony that Tim’s brother Alex - that erstwhile punk and eternal pacifist - was now on the front line as supervisor of the Piccadilly Circus station of the London Underground, not only chasing buskers from the tunnels where he used to busk, but uniformed, drilling his crew in emergency evacuation.

Tim was missing his family in Namibia and thought his Iraqi team was on the verge of self-sufficiency. But he also worried that they would become targets of the insurgents in Iraq, and he was both despondent and enraged by the Bush administration and its regime (then under Paul Bremer) in Baghdad: “The corruption, the incompetence, the greed, the lies, the brute stupidity.”

I confess I was elated to hear this. I did not then know that one of his men had lost a leg in a de-mining accident, nor that their compound was fired on daily, nor that he had been treated for depression in Ethiopia the year before. Nor did I suspect that his plane, while taking off from Baghdad, had had to weave to dodge a missile.

I had, like a good liberal mom, let him choose his views and his life, and now first-hand experience was bringing him round to mine. With better hindsight, my brother pointed out, “Tim was someone who thought that with ideals and a gun you could fix things.” He had put his life at the service of a government that stood on just such a belief, and his disillusionment cut deep.

Back in Iraq, a note in his appointment calendar for January 10 reads: “All mistakes anyway everything crazy now I hope I can make it home safe.” In late February, Tim completed his tour and rejoined his family in Windhoek, and he spent a couple of weeks in the jubilation of freedom.

But his re-entry to the low-level chaos of family life was hard. He was obsessively irritable in small ways. He became a news junkie. Madrid was attacked, the Spanish pulled out of Iraq, Falluja fell apart, hostages were taken. If all the contractors left, how could there be reconstruction? Tim’s work would have come to nothing but danger for the troops who trusted him. He obsessively emailed his men, but they were busy staying alive and answered at a lag if at all. He consoled himself with hunting on a gamefarm in Namibia, sending proud pictures of himself with a downed warthog, a springbok, a magnificent kudu.

Then, on Thursday April 22, hunting with an unfamiliar rifle in the wrong light, he wounded a gemsbok that he could not track. On his return, inconsolable, he told his stepson that he had found a tooth, which meant that he had hit the animal in the face. He had had to leave it, like his men in Iraq, to its fate.

Tim shot himself on the Friday evening in the dining room of his house in the Windhoek hills called Eros. It was a clean kill. The trajectory took the bullet through Tim’s cranium, a black and beige Herrera-patterned curtain, and out through a rectangular window pane, so that the best friend of his widow was able to pick up the pieces of his brain and her sister to mop the blood from the carpet.

A week later Alex would stand in front of that window in full McKenzie kilt regalia, on his way to his brother’s funeral - bringing together Tim’s Scottish heritage and his choice of Africa as homeland.

No one will ever know what exploded in Tim’s mind. And no one will know how many children for decades to come in Namibia, Angola, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Iraq will retain all four limbs because my kid, who loved weapons, accidentally stumbled into the profession of getting rid of them.

We do know, however, from the Namibian police, that the last gun he held was a 45-calibre Norinco model 1911 (nicknamed “Government”), serial number 901233.

They prised it from his cold, dead hand.

Friday July 2, 2004
The Guardian
© Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2004

Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free) - Arundhati Roy

2003-05-13T12:00:00.002+02:00

In these times, when we have to race to keep abreast of the speed at which our freedoms are being snatched from us, and when few can afford the luxury of retreating from the streets for a while in order to return with an exquisite, fully formed political thesis replete with footnotes and references, what profound gift can I offer you tonight?

As we lurch from crisis to crisis, beamed directly into our brains by satellite TV, we have to think on our feet. On the move. We enter histories through the rubble of war. Ruined cities, parched fields, shrinking forests, and dying rivers are our archives. Craters left by daisy cutters, our libraries.

So what can I offer you tonight? Some uncomfortable thoughts about money, war, empire, racism, and democracy. Some worries that flit around my brain like a family of persistent moths that keep me awake at night.

Some of you will think it bad manners for a person like me, officially entered in the Big Book of Modern Nations as an "Indian citizen," to come here and criticize the U.S. government. Speaking for myself, I'm no flag-waver, no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.

Since lectures must be called something, mine tonight is called: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free).

Way back in 1988, on the 3rd of July, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are."

I don't care what the facts are. What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps a slight variation on the theme would be more apposite: The facts can be whatever we want them to be.

When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al Qaida. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn't any). All of it is based on insinuation, auto-suggestion, and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the "Free Press," that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests.

Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.

Apart from the invented links between Iraq and Al Qaida, we had the manufactured frenzy about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. George Bush the Lesser went to the extent of saying it would be "suicidal" for the U.S. not to attack Iraq. We once again witnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed, besieged country was about to annihilate almighty America. (Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries - earlier there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Grenada, and Panama.) But this time it wasn't just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was Frenzy with a Purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the Doctrine of Pre-emptive Strike, a.k.a. The United States Can Do Whatever The Hell It Wants, And That's Official.

The war against Iraq has been fought and won and no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found. Not even a little one. Perhaps they'll have to be planted before they're discovered. And then, the more troublesome amongst us will need an explanation for why Saddam Hussein didn't use them when his country was being invaded.

Of course, there'll be no answers. True Believers will make do with those fuzzy TV reports about the discovery of a few barrels of banned chemicals in an old shed. There seems to be no consensus yet about whether they're really chemicals, whether they're actually banned and whether the vessels they're contained in can technically be called barrels. (There were unconfirmed rumours that a teaspoonful of potassium permanganate and an old harmonica were found there too.)

Meanwhile, in passing, an ancient civilization has been casually decimated by a very recent, casually brutal nation.

Then there are those who say, so what if Iraq had no chemical and nuclear weapons? So what if there is no Al Qaida connection? So what if Osama bin Laden hates Saddam Hussein as much as he hates the United States? Bush the Lesser has said Saddam Hussein was a "Homicidal Dictator." And so, the reasoning goes, Iraq needed a "regime change."

Never mind that forty years ago, the CIA, under President John F. Kennedy, orchestrated a regime change in Baghdad. In 1963, after a successful coup, the Ba'ath party came to power in Iraq. Using lists provided by the CIA, the new Ba'ath regime systematically eliminated hundreds of doctors, teachers, lawyers, and political figures known to be leftists. An entire intellectual community was slaughtered. (The same technique was used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia and East Timor.) The young Saddam Hussein was said to have had a hand in supervising the bloodbath. In 1979, after factional infighting within the Ba'ath Party, Saddam Hussein became the President of Iraq. In April 1980, while he was massacring Shias, the U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi declared, "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq." Washington and London overtly and covertly supported Saddam Hussein. They financed him, equipped him, armed him, and provided him with dual-use materials to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. They supported his worst excesses financially, materially, and morally. They supported the eight-year war against Iran and the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes which 14 years later were re-heated and served up as reasons to justify invading Iraq. After the first Gulf War, the "Allies" fomented an uprising of Shias in Basra and then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousands in an act of vengeful reprisal.

The point is, if Saddam Hussein was evil enough to merit the most elaborate, openly declared assassination attempt in history (the opening move of Operation Shock and Awe), then surely those who supported him ought at least to be tried for war crimes? Why aren't the faces of U.S. and U.K. government officials on the infamous pack of cards of wanted men and women?

Because when it comes to Empire, facts don't matter.

Yes, but all that's in the past we're told. Saddam Hussein is a monster who must be stopped now. And only the U.S. can stop him. It's an effective technique, this use of the urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future. Indonesia, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan - the list goes on and on. Right now there are brutal regimes being groomed for the future - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, the Central Asian Republics.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft recently declared that U.S. freedoms are "not the grant of any government or document, but….our endowment from God." (Why bother with the United Nations when God himself is on hand?)

So here we are, the people of the world, confronted with an Empire armed with a mandate from heaven (and, as added insurance, the most formidable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in history). Here we are, confronted with an Empire that has conferred upon itself the right to go to war at will, and the right to deliver people from corrupting ideologies, from religious fundamentalists, dictators, sexism, and poverty by the age-old, tried-and-tested practice of extermination. Empire is on the move, and Democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home-delivered to your doorstep by daisy cutters. Death is a small price for people to pay for the privilege of sampling this new product: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (bring to a boil, add oil, then bomb).

But then perhaps chinks, negroes, dinks, gooks, and wogs don't really qualify as real people. Perhaps our deaths don't qualify as real deaths. Our histories don't qualify as history. They never have.

Speaking of history, in these past months, while the world watched, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was broadcast on live TV. Like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the regime of Saddam Hussein simply disappeared. This was followed by what analysts called a "power vacuum." Cities that had been under siege, without food, water, and electricity for days, cities that had been bombed relentlessly, people who had been starved and systematically impoverished by the UN sanctions regime for more than a decade, were suddenly left with no semblance of urban administration. A seven-thousand-year-old civilization slid into anarchy. On live TV.

Vandals plundered shops, offices, hotels, and hospitals. American and British soldiers stood by and watched. They said they had no orders to act. In effect, they had orders to kill people, but not to protect them. Their priorities were clear. The safety and security of Iraqi people was not their business. The security of whatever little remained of Iraq's infrastructure was not their business. But the security and safety of Iraq's oil fields were. Of course they were. The oil fields were "secured" almost before the invasion began.

On CNN and BBC the scenes of the rampage were played and replayed. TV commentators, army and government spokespersons portrayed it as a "liberated people" venting their rage at a despotic regime. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "It's untidy. Freedom's untidy and free people are free to commit crimes and make mistakes and do bad things." Did anybody know that Donald Rumsfeld was an anarchist? I wonder - did he hold the same view during the riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King? Would he care to share his thesis about the Untidiness of Freedom with the two million people being held in U.S. prisons right now? (The world's "freest" country has the highest number of prisoners in the world.) Would he discuss its merits with young African American men, 28 percent of whom will spend some part of their adult lives in jail? Could he explain why he serves under a president who oversaw 152 executions when he was governor of Texas?

Before the war on Iraq began, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) sent the Pentagon a list of 16 crucial sites to protect. The National Museum was second on that list. Yet the Museum was not just looted, it was desecrated. It was a repository of an ancient cultural heritage. Iraq as we know it today was part of the river valley of Mesopotamia. The civilization that grew along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates produced the world's first writing, first calendar, first library, first city, and, yes, the world's first democracy. King Hammurabi of Babylon was the first to codify laws governing the social life of citizens. It was a code in which abandoned women, prostitutes, slaves, and even animals had rights. The Hammurabi code is acknowledged not just as the birth of legality, but the beginning of an understanding of the concept of social justice. The U.S. government could not have chosen a more inappropriate land in which to stage its illegal war and display its grotesque disregard for justice.

At a Pentagon briefing during the days of looting, Secretary Rumsfeld, Prince of Darkness, turned on his media cohorts who had served him so loyally through the war. "The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you say, 'My god, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'"

Laughter rippled through the press room. Would it be alright for the poor of Harlem to loot the Metropolitan Museum? Would it be greeted with similar mirth?

The last building on the ORHA list of 16 sites to be protected was the Ministry of Oil. It was the only one that was given protection. Perhaps the occupying army thought that in Muslim countries lists are read upside down?

Television tells us that Iraq has been "liberated" and that Afghanistan is well on its way to becoming a paradise for women-thanks to Bush and Blair, the 21st century's leading feminists. In reality, Iraq's infrastructure has been destroyed. Its people brought to the brink of starvation. Its food stocks depleted. And its cities devastated by a complete administrative breakdown. Iraq is being ushered in the direction of a civil war between Shias and Sunnis. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has lapsed back into the pre-Taliban era of anarchy, and its territory has been carved up into fiefdoms by hostile warlords.

Undaunted by all this, on the 2nd of May Bush the Lesser launched his 2004 campaign hoping to be finally elected U.S. President. In what probably constitutes the shortest flight in history, a military jet landed on an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which was so close to shore that, according to the Associated Press, administration officials acknowledged "positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline." President Bush, who never served his term in the military, emerged from the cockpit in fancy dress - a U.S. military bomber jacket, combat boots, flying goggles, helmet. Waving to his cheering troops, he officially proclaimed victory over Iraq. He was careful to say that it was "just one victory in a war on terror … [which] still goes on."

It was important to avoid making a straightforward victory announcement, because under the Geneva Convention a victorious army is bound by the legal obligations of an occupying force, a responsibility that the Bush administration does not want to burden itself with. Also, closer to the 2004 elections, in order to woo wavering voters, another victory in the "War on Terror" might become necessary. Syria is being fattened for the kill.

It was Herman Goering, that old Nazi, who said, "People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.… All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

He's right. It's dead easy. That's what the Bush regime banks on. The distinction between election campaigns and war, between democracy and oligarchy, seems to be closing fast.

The only caveat in these campaign wars is that U.S. lives must not be lost. It shakes voter confidence. But the problem of U.S. soldiers being killed in combat has been licked. More or less.

At a media briefing before Operation Shock and Awe was unleashed, General Tommy Franks announced, "This campaign will be like no other in history." Maybe he's right.

I'm no military historian, but when was the last time a war was fought like this?

After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million children dead, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons had been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the "Coalition of the Willing" (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army!

Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It was more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.

As soon as the war began, the governments of France, Germany, and Russia, which refused to allow a final resolution legitimizing the war to be passed in the UN Security Council, fell over each other to say how much they wanted the United States to win. President Jacques Chirac offered French airspace to the Anglo-American air force. U.S. military bases in Germany were open for business. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer publicly hoped for the "rapid collapse" of the Saddam Hussein regime. Vladimir Putin publicly hoped for the same. These are governments that colluded in the enforced disarming of Iraq before their dastardly rush to take the side of those who attacked it. Apart from hoping to share the spoils, they hoped Empire would honor their pre-war oil contracts with Iraq. Only the very naïve could expect old Imperialists to behave otherwise.

Leaving aside the cheap thrills and the lofty moral speeches made in the UN during the run up to the war, eventually, at the moment of crisis, the unity of Western governments - despite the opposition from the majority of their people - was overwhelming.

When the Turkish government temporarily bowed to the views of 90 percent of its population, and turned down the U.S. government's offer of billions of dollars of blood money for the use of Turkish soil, it was accused of lacking "democratic principles." According to a Gallup International poll, in no European country was support for a war carried out "unilaterally by America and its allies" higher than 11 percent. But the governments of England, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern Europe were praised for disregarding the views of the majority of their people and supporting the illegal invasion. That, presumably, was fully in keeping with democratic principles. What's it called? New Democracy? (Like Britain's New Labour?)

In stark contrast to the venality displayed by their governments, on the 15th of February, weeks before the invasion, in the most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen, more than 10 million people marched against the war on 5 continents. Many of you, I'm sure, were among them. They - we - were disregarded with utter disdain. When asked to react to the anti-war demonstrations, President Bush said, "It's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security, in this case the security of the people."

Democracy, the modern world's holy cow, is in crisis. And the crisis is a profound one. Every kind of outrage is being committed in the name of democracy. It has become little more than a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied of all content or meaning. It can be whatever you want it to be. Democracy is the Free World's whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of taste, available to be used and abused at will.

Until quite recently, right up to the 1980's, democracy did seem as though it might actually succeed in delivering a degree of real social justice.

But modern democracies have been around for long enough for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy - the "independent" judiciary, the "free" press, the parliament - and molding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder.

To fully comprehend the extent to which Democracy is under siege, it might be an idea to look at what goes on in some of our contemporary democracies. The World's Largest: India, (which I have written about at some length and therefore will not speak about tonight). The World's Most Interesting: South Africa. The world's most powerful: the U.S.A. And, most instructive of all, the plans that are being made to usher in the world's newest: Iraq.

In South Africa, after 300 years of brutal domination of the black majority by a white minority through colonialism and apartheid, a non-racial, multi-party democracy came to power in 1994. It was a phenomenal achievement. Within two years of coming to power, the African National Congress had genuflected with no caveats to the Market God. Its massive program of structural adjustment, privatization, and liberalization has only increased the hideous disparities between the rich and the poor. More than a million people have lost their jobs. The corporatization of basic services - electricity, water, and housing-has meant that 10 million South Africans, almost a quarter of the population, have been disconnected from water and electricity. 2 million have been evicted from their homes.

Meanwhile, a small white minority that has been historically privileged by centuries of brutal exploitation is more secure than ever before. They continue to control the land, the farms, the factories, and the abundant natural resources of that country. For them the transition from apartheid to neo-liberalism barely disturbed the grass. It's apartheid with a clean conscience. And it goes by the name of Democracy.

Democracy has become Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.

In countries of the first world, too, the machinery of democracy has been effectively subverted. Politicians, media barons, judges, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in an elaborate underhand configuration that completely undermines the lateral arrangement of checks and balances between the constitution, courts of law, parliament, the administration and, perhaps most important of all, the independent media that form the structural basis of a parliamentary democracy. Increasingly, the imbrication is neither subtle nor elaborate.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. The Financial Times reported that he controls about 90 percent of Italy's TV viewership. Recently, during a trial on bribery charges, while insisting he was the only person who could save Italy from the left, he said, "How much longer do I have to keep living this life of sacrifices?" That bodes ill for the remaining 10 percent of Italy's TV viewership. What price Free Speech? Free Speech for whom?

In the United States, the arrangement is more complex. Clear Channel Worldwide Incorporated is the largest radio station owner in the country. It runs more than 1,200 channels, which together account for 9 percent of the market. Its CEO contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush's election campaign. When hundreds of thousands of American citizens took to the streets to protest against the war on Iraq, Clear Channel organized pro-war patriotic "Rallies for America" across the country. It used its radio stations to advertise the events and then sent correspondents to cover them as though they were breaking news. The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretense, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists.

As America's show business gets more and more violent and war-like, and America's wars get more and more like show business, some interesting cross-overs are taking place. The designer who built the 250,000 dollar set in Qatar from which General Tommy Franks stage-managed news coverage of Operation Shock and Awe also built sets for Disney, MGM, and "Good Morning America."

It is a cruel irony that the U.S., which has the most ardent, vociferous defenders of the idea of Free Speech, and (until recently) the most elaborate legislation to protect it, has so circumscribed the space in which that freedom can be expressed. In a strange, convoluted way, the sound and fury that accompanies the legal and conceptual defense of Free Speech in America serves to mask the process of the rapid erosion of the possibilities of actually exercising that freedom.

The news and entertainment industry in the U.S. is for the most part controlled by a few major corporations - AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation. Each of these corporations owns and controls TV stations, film studios, record companies, and publishing ventures. Effectively, the exits are sealed.

America's media empire is controlled by a tiny coterie of people. Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, has proposed even further deregulation of the communication industry, which will lead to even greater consolidation.

So here it is - the World's Greatest Democracy, led by a man who was not legally elected. America's Supreme Court gifted him his job. What price have American people paid for this spurious presidency?

In the three years of George Bush the Lesser's term, the American economy has lost more than two million jobs. Outlandish military expenses, corporate welfare, and tax giveaways to the rich have created a financial crisis for the U.S. educational system. According to a survey by the National Council of State Legislatures, U.S. states cut 49 billion dollars in public services, health, welfare benefits, and education in 2002. They plan to cut another 25.7 billion dollars this year. That makes a total of 75 billion dollars. Bush's initial budget request to Congress to finance the war in Iraq was 80 billion dollars.

So who's paying for the war? America's poor. Its students, its unemployed, its single mothers, its hospital and home-care patients, its teachers, and health workers.

And who's actually fighting the war?

Once again, America's poor. The soldiers who are baking in Iraq's desert sun are not the children of the rich. Only one of all the representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate has a child fighting in Iraq. America's "volunteer" army in fact depends on a poverty draft of poor whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians looking for a way to earn a living and get an education. Federal statistics show that African Americans make up 21 percent of the total armed forces and 29 percent of the U.S. army. They count for only 12 percent of the general population. It's ironic, isn't it - the disproportionately high representation of African Americans in the army and prison? Perhaps we should take a positive view, and look at this as affirmative action at its most effective. Nearly 4 million Americans (2 percent of the population) have lost the right to vote because of felony convictions. Of that number, 1.4 million are African Americans, which means that 13 percent of all voting-age Black people have been disenfranchised.

For African Americans there's also affirmative action in death. A study by the economist Amartya Sen shows that African Americans as a group have a lower life expectancy than people born in China, in the Indian State of Kerala (where I come from), Sri Lanka, or Costa Rica. Bangladeshi men have a better chance of making it to the age of forty than African American men from here in Harlem.

This year, on what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 74th birthday, President Bush denounced the University of Michigan's affirmative action program favouring Blacks and Latinos. He called it "divisive," "unfair," and "unconstitutional." The successful effort to keep Blacks off the voting rolls in the State of Florida in order that George Bush be elected was of course neither unfair nor unconstitutional. I don't suppose affirmative action for White Boys From Yale ever is.

So we know who's paying for the war. We know who's fighting it. But who will benefit from it? Who is homing in on the reconstruction contracts estimated to be worth up to one hundred billon dollars? Could it be America's poor and unemployed and sick? Could it be America's single mothers? Or America's Black and Latino minorities?

Operation Iraqi Freedom, George Bush assures us, is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via Corporate Multinationals. Like Bechtel, like Chevron, like Halliburton.

Once again, it is a small, tight circle that connects corporate, military, and government leadership to one another. The promiscuousness, the cross-pollination is outrageous.

Consider this: the Defense Policy Board is a government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon. Its members are appointed by the under secretary of defense and approved by Donald Rumsfeld. Its meetings are classified. No information is available for public scrutiny.

The Washington-based Center for Public Integrity found that 9 out of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board are connected to companies that were awarded defense contracts worth 76 billion dollars between the years 2001 and 2002. One of them, Jack Sheehan, a retired Marine Corps general, is a senior vice president at Bechtel, the giant international engineering outfit. Riley Bechtel, the company chairman, is on the President's Export Council. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group, is the chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. When asked by the New York Times whether he was concerned about the appearance of a conflict of interest, he said, "I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it."

Bechtel has been awarded a 680 million dollar reconstruction contract in Iraq. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaign efforts.
Arcing across this subterfuge, dwarfing it by the sheer magnitude of its malevolence, is America's anti-terrorism legislation. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, has become the blueprint for similar anti-terrorism bills in countries across the world. It was passed in the House of Representatives by a majority vote of 337 to 79. According to the New York Times, "Many lawmakers said it had been impossible to truly debate or even read the legislation."

The Patriot Act ushers in an era of systemic automated surveillance. It gives the government the authority to monitor phones and computers and spy on people in ways that would have seemed completely unacceptable a few years ago. It gives the FBI the power to seize all of the circulation, purchasing, and other records of library users and bookstore customers on the suspicion that they are part of a terrorist network. It blurs the boundaries between speech and criminal activity creating the space to construe acts of civil disobedience as violating the law.

Already hundreds of people are being held indefinitely as "unlawful combatants." (In India, the number is in the thousands. In Israel, 5,000 Palestinians are now being detained.) Non-citizens, of course, have no rights at all. They can simply be "disappeared" like the people of Chile under Washington's old ally, General Pinochet. More than 1,000 people, many of them Muslim or of Middle Eastern origin, have been detained, some without access to legal representatives.

Apart from paying the actual economic costs of war, American people are paying for these wars of "liberation" with their own freedoms. For the ordinary American, the price of "New Democracy" in other countries is the death of real democracy at home.

Meanwhile, Iraq is being groomed for "liberation." (Or did they mean "liberalization" all along?) The Wall Street Journal reports that "the Bush administration has drafted sweeping plans to remake Iraq's economy in the U.S. image."

Iraq's constitution is being redrafted. Its trade laws, tax laws, and intellectual property laws rewritten in order to turn it into an American-style capitalist economy.

The United States Agency for International Development has invited U.S. companies to bid for contracts that range between road building, water systems, text book distribution, and cell phone networks.

Soon after Bush the Second announced that he wanted American farmers to feed the world, Dan Amstutz, a former senior executive of Cargill, the biggest grain exporter in the world, was put in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq. Kevin Watkins, Oxfam's policy director, said, "Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission."

The two men who have been short-listed to run operations for managing Iraqi oil have worked with Shell, BP, and Fluor. Fluor is embroiled in a lawsuit by black South African workers who have accused the company of exploiting and brutalizing them during the apartheid era. Shell, of course, is well known for its devastation of the Ogoni tribal lands in Nigeria.

Tom Brokaw (one of America's best-known TV anchors) was inadvertently succinct about the process. "One of the things we don't want to do," he said, "is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we're going to own that country."

Now that the ownership deeds are being settled, Iraq is ready for New Democracy.
So, as Lenin used to ask: What Is To Be Done?

Well…

We might as well accept the fact that there is no conventional military force that can successfully challenge the American war machine. Terrorist strikes only give the U.S. Government an opportunity that it is eagerly awaiting to further tighten its stranglehold. Within days of an attack you can bet that Patriot II would be passed. To argue against U.S. military aggression by saying that it will increase the possibilities of terrorist strikes is futile. It's like threatening Brer Rabbit that you'll throw him into the bramble bush. Any one who has read the documents written by The Project for the New American Century can attest to that. The government's suppression of the Congressional committee report on September 11th, which found that there was intelligence warning of the strikes that was ignored, also attests to the fact that, for all their posturing, the terrorists and the Bush regime might as well be working as a team. They both hold people responsible for the actions of their governments. They both believe in the doctrine of collective guilt and collective punishment. Their actions benefit each other greatly.

The U.S. government has already displayed in no uncertain terms the range and extent of its capability for paranoid aggression. In human psychology, paranoid aggression is usually an indicator of nervous insecurity. It could be argued that it's no different in the case of the psychology of nations. Empire is paranoid because it has a soft underbelly.

Its "homeland" may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable. Already the Internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets - Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds - government agencies like USAID, the British DFID, British and American banks, Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, and American Express could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and refined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs the amorphous but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of Corporate Globalization is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.

It would be naïve to imagine that we can directly confront Empire. Our strategy must be to isolate Empire's working parts and disable them one by one. No target is too small. No victory too insignificant. We could reverse the idea of the economic sanctions imposed on poor countries by Empire and its Allies. We could impose a regime of Peoples' Sanctions on every corporate house that has been awarded with a contract in postwar Iraq, just as activists in this country and around the world targeted institutions of apartheid. Each one of them should be named, exposed, and boycotted. Forced out of business. That could be our response to the Shock and Awe campaign. It would be a great beginning.

Another urgent challenge is to expose the corporate media for the boardroom bulletin that it really is. We need to create a universe of alternative information. We need to support independent media like Democracy Now!, Alternative Radio, and South End Press.

The battle to reclaim democracy is going to be a difficult one. Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries but, if it is to succeed, it has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor's chambers. Empire's conquests are being carried out in your name, and you have the right to refuse. You could refuse to fight. Refuse to move those missiles from the warehouse to the dock. Refuse to wave that flag. Refuse the victory parade.

You have a rich tradition of resistance. You need only read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States to remind yourself of this.

Hundreds of thousands of you have survived the relentless propaganda you have been subjected to, and are actively fighting your own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the United States, that's as brave as any Iraqi or Afghan or Palestinian fighting for his or her homeland.

If you join the battle, not in your hundreds of thousands, but in your millions, you will be greeted joyously by the rest of the world. And you will see how beautiful it is to be gentle instead of brutal, safe instead of scared. Befriended instead of isolated. Loved instead of hated.

I hate to disagree with your president. Yours is by no means a great nation. But you could be a great people.

History is giving you the chance.

Seize the time.

_____________________________________________

Presented in New York City at The Riverside Church
May 13, 2003
Sponsored by the Center for Economic and Social Rights
Copyright 2003 by Arundhati RoySponsored by the Center for Economic and Social Rights http://www.cesr.org/
For permission to use or reprint, contact: arnove@igc.org.

Sex with the Imperfect Stranger - Patrick Califia

2002-11-20T12:00:00.001+01:00

"Why should a transsexual be a menace to you?"
-- Riki Wilchins, founder of the direct action group Transexual Menace

November 20, 2002, is a day of remembrance for the transgendered community to honor our beloved dead. This custom, begun three years ago by Gwendolyn Ann Smith, has grown until this year it includes events in 35 cities in the U.S. and abroad. In 2001, transactivists often said that one person was reported killed every month because of prejudice against transgendered people. This phraseology is used because not all of the victims of prejudice against transgenderism are themselves cross-dressers or transsexual. They include, for example, people like Calpernia Addams' boyfriend, Barry Winchell. He was a soldier who was killed by two other men in his unit who were incensed that his lover was a transgendered woman.1 Two dozen such deaths have been reported this year.2 One of these killings took place on October 3, the body discovered about two weeks later. The recent death of Gwen Araujo (born Eddie) makes this an especially somber day.

As I write this I am looking at an undated photograph of Gwen (who sometimes called herself Lida). She is wearing a hooded sweatshirt, holding a baby and smiling, looking like any high school girl baby-sitting for one of her mother's friends.3 It is painful and disturbing to imagine her dead body, wrapped in a blanket, buried in a shallow grave in a remote campground.4 When one of the people who had witnessed her murder led police to that hiding place, she still had a rope wrapped around her neck. She had been stabbed several times and beaten. When I read the account of her injuries, I feel as if I too am a witness of the fury and, yes, terror that reportedly drove a group of young men to murder her. It is as if she has to be killed over and over again. This is a common (if such savagery can be described by such a banal word) characteristic of the murders of transgendered women. It is clear that the perpetrators of these vicious crimes are trying to obliterate something else, something beyond her -- something, I believe, that they hate and fear within themselves.

Michael Magidson, 27; Jason Nabors, 19; Paul Merel Jr., 25; and his brother, Jose Merel, 24, were arrested on suspicion of homicide. Magidson, Nabors and Jose Merel were charged with murder and the commission of a hate crime.5 (California is one of only five states that include gender identity in their hate crime laws.) A fourth suspect, Jason Cazares, 22, was recently charged solely with murder.6

On October 3, the day that she died, Gwen was 17 years old. According to news accounts, she went to a party that was fated to turn ugly. Although Gwen had worn women's clothes for several years, she had never worn a skirt in public before.7 She was apparently nervous about this, because she took a pair of pants with her to change into if the more feminine outfit became uncomfortable or dangerous. At the party, she reportedly had a few beers and had anal sex with Jose Merel, a boy she had a crush on, and perhaps with a friend of his, Michael Magidson. Things started to go wrong when Nicole Brown, the girlfriend of Jose's brother, followed Gwen into the bathroom (or, by some accounts, took her in there) and discovered that she wasn't a biological female. "It's a man, let's go," she called out, and the attack began.

This makes it sound like the people at the party had no idea that Gwen Araujo was not born male. But according to one of Araujo's friends, Stephanie Baumann, she didn't pass. "I don't understand how those men could say they had no idea he was a guy. If you just saw him, you'd know," she told reporters from the San Jose Mercury News.8 Several other details reported in this case do not ring true. It is reported that Araujo had an altercation with the suspects about a week before the party. (She had also been found unconscious in front of a church near her home a few weeks before the murder. Her mother said she had been beaten.)9

This was someone who had been insisting on wearing makeup, women's clothing and using a female name since she was 14. She had frequently been taunted and threatened. She'd been unable to find a job locally because of her gender expression. Why would she willingly attend a social event with people who hated her -- unless she was lured to that party? Or, as one source suggests, she was dating one of the men who are now charged with killing her.10 The "gender check" apparently performed by one of the arrested men's girlfriend is also suspicious. The whole thing sounds like a setup. It is quite reasonable to ask if the sex that reportedly took place was consensual. Paul Merel says his girlfriend woke him up and made him leave the party with her when the attack began, but he also says he saw Araujo on the floor with her skirt pulled up. That sort of exposure smacks of sexual humiliation if not outright rape.11 It's also possible that if one of the men present was her boyfriend, he was utterly and completely humiliated when Gwen's biological sex was publicly exposed, and was so afraid for his own reputation that he became enraged and violent. A more accurate account of what happened probably will not emerge until the trial.

In a small town like Newark, California, it is doubtful that everyone at the party was completely ignorant of Gwen's gender status. Gossip like that travels far and fast. And the defendants were well-enough known to her for their names to appear in a Harry Potter address book that police found in her belongings.12 Did an entire group of people conspire to expose and punish someone who had been getting on their nerves for years? Did the fact that they had gotten away with assaulting her a week earlier encourage them to escalate the violence? "We're dealing with a number of people [at the party] who could have helped, stepped in, prevented or reported this," says Newark Police Lt. Lance Morrison. "None of them did."13

Gwen's mother reported her missing when she did not come home from the party. Scary rumors about her fate circulated for two weeks until one of the party-goers cracked. Jaron Nabors contacted the police and took them to where Gwen's body was buried, 150 miles into the Sierra Nevada foothills. The location was so remote that it could only be reached by a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Morrison described the crime scene as "haunting and gruesome."14

I'm not sure why this murder of a transgendered person has gotten so much more attention in the press than previous cases like the June 2001 murder of two-spirited Fredericka Martinez, a 16-year-old Navajo from Cortez, Colorado.15 Bay Area cultural critic David Steinberg speculates it's because the death took place in Newark, California, near the "proudly open-minded,

relatively diversity-accepting San Francisco Bay Area," and because she had strong support and acceptance from her family.16 Her youth and beauty make her a sympathetic figure. She had been driven out of public school by her bigoted peers, she had problems with drugs and alcohol. Maybe the poignant deaths of Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepherd have tenderized the conscience of the mass media. The high school that could not tolerate Araujo's attendance was, ironically enough, producing The Laramie Project, a play about the Wyoming murder of Shepherd, a gay man who was pistol whipped, tied to a fence and left to freeze to death by two men who later claimed he had propositioned them.17

Araujo's case has generated so much indignation that some gay activists have expressed concern about the defendants being treated fairly, and attempted to remind antiviolence advocates of the flaws in our criminal justice system. Bill Dobbs is a gay civil libertarian and a member of Queer Watch, a gay justice group that has lobbied GLBT organizations to take a position against the death penalty. Dobbs questions the addition of hate crimes charges and indeed questions the entire concept of hate crimes enhancement. "Hate crime?" he says. "This is a horrible killing, and murder charges have been brought. Murder is a million-dollar word. Prosecuting this as a hate crime undercuts the horror of intentional killing. The push for hate crimes laws comes from a mistaken belief that we can stamp out ugly deeds with longer prison sentences. More 'law and order' will not solve the social problem here, hatred towards GLBT people. Gwen Araujo's death raises many issues, including how often transgender persons are attacked. Those issues deserve our attention; at the same time, we must consider carefully what we demand of the criminal justice system. It is worrisome when a group like the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition calls for maximum punishment long before any trial has begun. Those charged in connection with Gwen Araujo's death deserve fair legal treatment. We must not lose sight of justice."18

Stories about Gwen's death appeared on CNN, in USA Today and in the New York Times. Although generally sympathetic in tone, articles about the case often referred to Araujo as a cross-dresser and used male pronouns. (Araujo's mother suffered from the same problem, referring to her transgendered child as "he" even while revealing her plans to bury Gwen in female clothing and put the name Gwen on her headstone.) But a spate of letters from readers who felt this was an insult to the dead girl moved the San Francisco Chronicle to editorialize about the "pronoun problem," and an article they ran about Jack Thompson, a female-to-male teenager, was carefully edited to refer to him as such.19 Reporter Kelly St. John insisted upon this usage, and the newspaper is considering the updated Associated Press style which calls for use of the pronoun consistent with the way a transgendered individual lives publicly. (Old guidelines had insisted on using the birth name and sex assigned at birth until after sex-change surgery.)

Other signs of positive social change have been noted. The spokeswoman for San Francisco's Community United Against Violence, Tina D'Elia, praised the Newark Police Department officer who handled Araujo's case for his unique sensitivity. It would have been nice if Newark city leaders had publicly expressed their indignation about the crime or attended Araujo's funeral, but at least they drew hostile fire in the local press for keeping their heads down.20 "Kids are dying out there because they don't meet narrow gender norms," said Riki Wilchins, executive director of the Washington, DC-based Gender Public Advocacy Coalition. "I'm confident change is coming as crimes like these raise people's awareness. Unfortunately, it's not happening quick enough."21

Sadly, the killing of Araujo did not end her persecution. She was buried on October 25 in a casket adorned with butterflies. Her mother had dressed her in a lace blouse and had her fingernails done in rainbow glitter. Rev. Jeff Finley eulogized Gwen, saying, "I wonder how many times Eddie cried in secret, wondering, where do I fit in? Maybe we were not there enough for you, because we did not understand."22 But Araujo's family was probably remembering the night before, when the notorious publicity hound and homo-hate-monger Fred Phelps dared to show up with a band of 23 of his crazed followers and picket her mother's house, bearing signs that said, "Eddie's in hell."23

Araujo's case has been prominently featured on Phelps' Website, www.godhatesfags.com, as well as the Website of the Army of God and other right-wing Christian organizations. Right-wingers were also quick to take umbrage at the compassionate and respectful tone taken by more liberal newspapers. One critic ridiculed "the liberal Hate Crimes crowd" and "the ridiculous whining that began right after Araujo's death, about the media not using the 'correct' pronouns or names in their coverage of the story... Never mind that journalists are required to report the facts of a given news story... such points as a subject's gender and legal name."24 I've yet to see an article about the case that did not include Araujo's birth name and the sex she was assigned at birth. But even such a trifling matter as including the name that she preferred to be called is seen by conservatives as a very big step down the slippery slope toward (gasp) social acceptance of transgendered people. "[P]art of the campaign to further 'understanding of transgender issues' is to indoctrinate, or to use a more politically correct term, to educate children on such subjects in school," sniped the right-wing Chron Watch Website. The person responsible for this editorial seems oblivious to the fact that Gwen Araujo was a child who went to school, a school where she found no safety. And school systems that keep silent about homosexuality and transgenderism teach queer bashers -- taught the murderers of Gwen Araujo -- that it was socially acceptable to target butch girls and femme boys.

The most twisted response to this 5'6", slightly built teenager's death has to be an article by Zach Calef which appeared in the Iowa State Daily. Let's not forget that Araujo not only suffered blunt force trauma to the head, she was also tied up, stabbed in the face and body, and dragged into the garage where a rope was tied around her neck by a crowd of assailants, who strangled her. But Calef terms this violence as "simply a reaction to a form of rape." Throughout this screed, Calef refers to Araujo as "he" and says, "He tricked them into having sex with him, but if they would have known his sex, they wouldn't have been interested. That is just as bad as rape." He concedes, "Given the circumstances, murder is a bit much," but suggests Magidson, et al. were "not in a normal mind set when they acted ... probably 'temporarily insane'" and so should be "charged with manslaughter or something along those lines." Calef even has the gall to argue that the murder is not a hate crime, because according to him, that would mean "the underlying reason for the beating was Araujo's sexual orientation. And that is not the case. The men did what they did because Araujo violated them. He used lies and deception to trick them into having sex. He was not honest with them and had he been, none of this would have happened. A hate crime should not even be considered. No one killed him because he was a cross-dresser. These men were truly violated. They were raped."25

It's fascinating that Calef assumes that he knows so much about what happened between this transgendered teenager and the men who reportedly fucked and then murdered her. His scenario is based on a dreary stereotype that is horribly familiar to anyone who has followed legal cases in which ostensibly straight men are charged with assaulting or killing gay men or transgendered people. These defendants always argue that it was the queer who came on to them, who used deceit or force in an attempt to wring some sexual gratification out of them. Defense attorneys try (with a depressing amount of success) to get judges and juries to see their clients' violent behavior much as Calef does -- as a perfectly understandable state of rage that springs from a feeling of having been violated. This strategy relies on widespread social acceptance of the belief that this is what straight men are supposed to do when their heterosexual identities are threatened. They are supposed to murder in defense of their masculinity. Because if one of them doesn't do this, if he does not violently repudiate the possibility that he found it pleasurable to have sexual contact with someone who was not born female, then he must be queer himself. (What often goes unstated is the corollary that this would then make him liable to stigma and assault.)

Sex with a new person is always a risk, whether you're on a blind date or hiring a sex worker. You are always going to come out of such an encounter with information about the other person that you didn't have before. (And they are going to carry away some secrets about you, as well.) I am always skeptical about the claims made by johns who say they had no idea the gorgeous girl they screwed was "really a guy" [sic]. But even if his astonishment is real, what is the appropriate response? If I find out that somebody I had sex with is really married, and this is a huge disappointment to me, or morally offensive, does that justify killing them? Of course not. Suppose I've tried something new, something I never thought I would like, and after the pleasure is over, I feel upset about what I've done. Remorse is often the precursor to self¬knowledge. So I have a lot to think about. I may decide I never want to do that again, and I may work through my shame or anxiety and integrate this new pleasure into my repertoire. What I absolutely ought not to do is attempt to obliterate the person who set this uncomfortable but pretty common process in motion. If you don't get what you want out of a sexual encounter, you may have very powerful feelings about it, but the thing to do is put your pants or panties back on, and take your feelings with you when you leave.

The number of gay men or transgendered people who feel powerful enough to try to pressure a straight guy into having sex with them -- let alone actually rape him -- is miniscule. The victim in such cases is usually deliberately sought out by the attackers, hunted down and intimidated, battered or slaughtered. Violence against sexual minority people is a sport. And the number of straight men who occasionally or habitually have sex with other men or with male-to-female transgendered people is so high that the word "heterosexual" ought to always have quotes around it. Given the fact that the men accused of killing Araujo are known to have harassed her before they took her life, it seems highly unlikely that they were shocked by her genitalia. Perhaps what really happened is that they were caught enjoying sex with someone who was not a socially sanctioned object of desire. They were, it's reasonable to suspect, quite happy to make use of her body as long as that activity wasn't a matter of public knowledge. This would make them hypocrites, not rape victims.

The creepy illogic that informs Calef's infamous article is so pervasive that the right wing is using the defamatory stereotype of transgendered people as sexual predators to attack civil rights legislation. The National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) has protested attack ads circulated shortly before voters were asked to retain or repeal an equal rights ordinance in Ypsilanti, Michigan. This bedroom community of less than 23,000 people has been under a relentless right-wing siege to overturn its civil rights ordinance ever since it was passed in 1997. All previous attempts have failed. Tom Monaghan, an anti-abortion activist and wealthy ex-CEO of Domino's Pizza, former Green Bay Packer Reggie White, a religious soul group called the Winans Sisters and Ypsilanti Citizens Voting Yes for Equal Rights not Special Rights are among the opposition. Ypsilanti Campaign for Equality, which does not have the big budget of the forces for repeal, has gone door-to-door to counter ads that feature a picture of a preoperative transsexual with the caption, "Will you vote YES to protect your daughter... your granddaughter... from being forced to use the girl's bathroom with men like this?"26

NTAC chair Vanessa Edwards Foster responds, "It's misleading, and very provocative. They implant the message of 'protect your daughters' with the false image that male-to-female transgenders all somehow rape or molest. It's only a step away from the Klan movie Birth ofa Nation inferring a need to protect your daughters by saying that all black men wanted to rape white women. These broad generalizations are not only inaccurate, they're defamatory and damaging to an entire class of people."27

Speaking as a preoperative transgendered person who is sometimes forced to use public restrooms, I want to point out that we are the people who are especially at risk there. Even when I go into a stall and lock the door, I am always afraid to take my pants down while other men make use of nearby urinals and stalls. It has been more than a year since anybody challenged my gender identity in public. But if the difference between my face and my genitals is ever going to become an explosive issue, it is there, and I hate it. Gwen Araujo was someone's daughter. She was someone's granddaughter. And her biological sex was exposed in a place that was supposed to be private, by an intrusive straight woman, who may have then incited the men at the party to kill her. Non-transgendered people don't need protection from us in public bathrooms or elsewhere. We need protection from them.

Among the people that Araujo needed protection from was her own therapist. Between the ages of 14 and 16, she is reported to have worked with Linda Skerbec. Skerbec is associated with the Focus on the Family ministry, that bizarre organization in Colorado that sponsors "National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day." Focus on the Family endorses so-called "reparative therapy" to change gay people into heterosexuals, a dubious and ineffective practice that has been condemned by the American Psychological Association. After Araujo's death, Skerbec told one reporter that she was about to persuade her client to "move beyond the label" of transgender and "claim the sexual identity that matched his anatomy. To me, Eddie was very much a male, a creative, sensitive male. But I worried some. I knew that kids like Eddie could be hurt."28 Why, yes -- by mental health professionals who are unethical, poorly trained and blinded by hateful religious ideology. With "support" like this, no wonder Araujo had problems with drugs and alcohol, couldn't pursue her education and engaged in other self-destructive behavior.

This is the kind of violence that legal reform cannot address. Transsexuals are hated because our existence breaks up the hegemony of "normal" social sex-roles and compulsory heterosexuality. In this era, the existence of "opposite sexes," male and female, is thought to be dictated by biology. This view of nature ignores a plethora of gender-fucking and same-sex activity among mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles and insects.29 Gwen Araujo had to teach herself how to put on makeup. When she put on a skirt, she was perceived as pretending to be a woman, being a cross-dresser, going in drag. But her sisters and her mother had also been taught how to "put on" the clothing and mannerisms of women. If being a human female was a simple matter of obeying the dictates of biology, how much of this conditioning would be necessary? Why would it be necessary for our society to enforce such horrendous penalties upon people who violate these norms? Of course our physicality, our genetic inheritance, plays a huge role in our personalities and the presentation of self. But transsexuals are as much a part of nature as female babies born with vulvas and wombs who grow up to be feminine straight women. We belong here, too.

_______________________

1. Thomas Hackett, "The Execution of Private Barry Winchell," Rolling Stone, March 2, 2000. Posted on-line at www.davidclemens.com/gaymilitary/rolstobarry.htm.
2. Information supplied by the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition website, www. ntac. org.
3. The Free Radical, "A Real Horror Story: The Murder of Eddie Araujo," http:/1.editthispage.com/2002/11/01.
4. Niesha Gates, "Body Found in El Dorado County Identified," The Sacramento Bee, October 18, 2002. www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/4842263p-5855552c. html.
5. "Anti-transgender Violence is Common," Associated Press, October 20, 2002, posted on www. geocities. com/dan a_rivers_2000/featurednews.html.
6. "Fourth Suspect Charged in Transgender Death," In Brief/Fremont, Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2000, www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sbriefs20.3nov20.story?null.
7. Karen de Sá, "Teen's Sad Tale," San Jose, California, The Mercury News, October 26, 2002. Posted on-line at www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/4374271./htm.
8. Jessie Seyfer and Lisa Fernandez, "Parents of Arrested Man Say He Did Not Kill Cross-Dressing Teen," San Jose Mercury News, October 21, 2002. Posted on-line at www. geocities. com/dan a_rivers_2000/featurednews.html.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Associated Press, "Three Charged with Hate Crime-Murder of Cross-Dressing Teen,"October 19, 2002, posted on-line at www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/10/19/teen.killed.ap/
12. Karen de Sá, op. cit.
13. "Three Men Arraigned in Death of Transgendered Teen," National Transgender Advocacy Coalition press release, October 19, 2002. Posted on-line at www.ntac.org/pr/release.asp?did=50.
14. Ibid.
15. David Steinberg, "Comes Naturally: RIP, Gwen Araujo: Uncommon Response to an All Too-Common Crime," The Spectator, Issue 1255, October 31, 2002. Posted on-line at www. spectator. net/ 1255/pages/1255_steinberg.html.
16. Steinberg, et al.
17. Michelle Locke, "Life Imitated Life as Show Goes On," Associated Press, November 9, 2002. Posted on-line at www.cjonline.com/stories/111002/art_laramie.shtml.
18. Bill Dobbs, e-mail interview by Patrick Califia, November 22, 2002.
19. Christopher Heredia, "Transgender Teen's Slaying Shakes Nation," San Francisco Chronicle, October 23, 2002. Posted on-line at www.glsen.org/templates/news/ record.html?section=12&record=1422. Also see Annie Nakao, "What's In A Pronoun? We're all Figuring It Out," San Francisco Chronicle, November 7, 2002. Posted on-line at www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cig?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/07/DD116742.DTL.
20. Rob Kuznia, "City's Response to Slaying Under Fire," The Argus, October 31, 2002. Posted on-line at www.theargusonline.com/Stories/ 0,1413,83%257E1968%257E960612,00.html.
21. Heredia, op. cit.
22. Karen de Sá, op. cit.
23. "We stand in Solidarity with Gwen's Family," www.roanoke7.com.
24. Cinnamon Stillwell, "The Chron Teaches Transgender 101," Chron Watch: Striving for Balance in the News, November 11, 2002, www.chronwatch.com/editorial/ contentDisplay.asp?aid=802.
25. Zach Calef, "Double Standard in Reactions to Rape," Iowa State Daily, October 24, 2002. Posted on-line at www.iowastatedaily.com/vnews/display.v/ ART/2002/10/24/3db7765f45381.
26. "NTAC Decries Cheap Shot Tactics in Ypsilanti Campaign," National Transgender Advocacy Coalition press release, November 3, 2002. Posted on-line at www.chicagogender.com/news_items/htm.
27. Ibid.
28. Karen de Sá, op. cit.
29. Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, New York City: St. Martin's Press/Stonewall Inn Editions, 1999. On page 1, Bagemihl says, "Any book on homosexuality and transgender in animals is necessarily unfinished, a work in progress. The subject is so vast, the types of behaviors so varied, and the number of species involved so large, as to defy any attempt at comprehensiveness."

________________________________

Patrick Califia is the author and editor of several fiction and nonfiction books which investigate various aspects of sexual politics. These include Public Sex, a collection of essays; Melting Point and Macho Sluts, short-story collections; and Sensuous Magic, a guide for adventurous couples. Patrick's newest books are Sex Changes, an examination of the politics of transsexuality; Diesel Fuel, a volume of passionate lesbian poetry; and No Mercy, another collection of stories. You can visit Patrick's web site at http://www.patcalifia.com.

Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class - bell hooks

2000-11-17T00:00:00.004+01:00

As a child, I often wanted things money could buy that my parents could not afford and would not get. Rather than tell us we did not get some material thing because money was lacking, mama would frequently manipulate us in an effort to make the desire go away. Sometimes she would belittle and shame us about the object of our desire. That's what I remember most. That lovely yellow dress I wanted would become in her storytelling mouth a really ugly mammy-made thing that no girl who cared about her looks would desire. My desires were often made to seem worthless and stupid. I learned to mistrust and silence them. I learned that the more clearly I named my desires, the more unlikely those desires would ever be fulfilled.

I learned that my inner life was more peaceful if I did not think about money, or allow myself to indulge in any fantasy of desire. I learned the art of sublimation and repression. I learned it was better to make do with acceptable material desires than to articulate the unacceptable. Before I knew money mattered, I had often chosen objects to desire that were costly, things a girl of my class would not ordinarily desire. But then I was still a girl who was unaware of class, who did not think my desires were stupid and wrong. And when I found they were, I let them go. I concentrated on survival, on making do.

When I was choosing a college to attend, the issue of money surfaced and had to be talked about. While I would seek loans and scholarships, even if everything related to school was paid for, there would still be transportation to pay for, books, and a host of other hidden costs. Letting me know that there was no extra money to be had, mama urged me to attend any college nearby that would offer financial aid. My first year of college, I went to a school close to home. A plain-looking white woman recruiter had sat in our living room and explained to my parents that everything would be taken care of, that I would be awarded a full academic scholarship, that they would have to pay nothing. They knew better. Still they found this school acceptable.

After my parents dropped me at the predominately white women's college, I saw the terror in my roommate's face that she was going to be housed with someone black, and I requested a change. She had no doubt also voiced her concern. I was given a tiny single room by the stairs—a room usually denied a first-year student—but I was a first-year black student, a scholarship girl who could never in a million years have afforded to pay her way or absorb the cost of a single room. My fellow students kept their distance from me. I ate in the cafeteria and did not have to worry about who would pay for pizza and drinks in the world outside. I kept my desires to myself, my lacks, and my loneliness; I made do.

I rarely shopped. Boxes came from home, with brand-new clothes mama had purchased. Even though it was never spoken, she did not want me to feel ashamed among privileged white girls. I was the only black girl in my dorm. There was no room in me for shame. I felt contempt and disinterest. With their giggles and their obsession to marry, the white girls at the women's college were aliens. We did not reside on the same planet. I lived in the world of books. The one white woman who became my close friend found me there reading. I was hiding under the shadows of a tree with huge branches, the kinds of trees that just seemed to grow effortlessly on well-to-do college campuses. I sat on the "perfect" grass reading poetry, wondering how the grass around me could be so lovely, and yet, when daddy had tried to grow grass in the front yard of Mr. Porter's house, it always turned yellow or brown and then died. Endlessly, the yard defeated him, until finally he gave up. The outside of the house looked good, but the yard always hinted at the possibility of endless neglect. The yard looked poor.

Foliage and trees on the college grounds flourished. Greens were lush and deep. From my place in the shadows, I saw a fellow student sitting alone weeping. Her sadness had to do with all the trivia that haunted our day's classwork, the fear of not being smart enough, of losing financial aid (like me she had loans and scholarships, though her family paid some), and boys. Coming from an Illinois family of Czechoslovakian immigrants, she understood class.

When she talked about the other girls who flaunted their wealth and family background, there was a hard edge of contempt, anger, and envy in her voice. Envy was always something I pushed away from my psyche. Kept too close for comfort, envy could lead to infatuation and on to desire. I desired nothing that they had. She desired everything, speaking her desires openly, without shame. Growing up in the kind of community where there was constant competition to see who could buy the bigger better whatever, in a world of organized labor, of unions and strikes, she understood a world of bosses and workers, of haves and have-nots.

White friends I had known in high school wore their class privilege modestly. Raised, like myself, in church traditions that taught us to identify only with the poor, we knew that there was evil in excess. We knew rich people were rarely allowed into heaven. God had given them a paradise of bounty on earth, and they had not shared. The rare ones, the rich people who shared, were the only ones able to meet the divine in paradise, and even then it was harder for them to find their way. According to the high-school friends we knew, flaunting wealth was frowned upon in our world, frowned upon by God and community.

The few women I befriended my first year in college were not wealthy. They were the ones who shared with me stories of the other girls flaunting the fact that they could buy anything expensive—clothes, food, vacations. There were not many of us from working-class backgrounds; we knew who we were. Most girls from poor backgrounds tried to blend in, or fought back by triumphing over wealth with beauty or style or some combination of the above. Being black made me an automatic outsider. Holding their world in contempt pushed me further to the edge. One of the fun things the "in" girls did was choose someone and trash their room. Like so much else deemed cute by insiders, I dreaded the thought of strangers entering my space and going through my things. Being outside the in crowd made me an unlikely target. Being contemptuous made me first on the list. I did not understand. And when my room was trashed, it unleashed my rage and deep grief over not being able to protect my space from violation and invasion. I hated that girls who had so much, took so much for granted, never considered that those of us who did not have mad money would not be able to replace broken things, perfume poured out, or talcum powder spread everywhere—that we did not know everything could be taken care of at the dry cleaner's, because we never took our clothes there. My rage fueled by contempt was deep, strong, and long lasting. Daily it stood as a challenge to their fun, to their habits of being.

Nothing they did to win me over worked. It came as a great surprise. They had always believed black girls wanted to be white girls, wanted to possess their world. My stony gaze, silence, and absolute refusal to cross the threshold of their world was total mystery; it was for them a violation they needed to avenge. After trashing my room, they tried to win me over with apologies and urges to talk and understand. There was nothing about me I wanted them to understand. Everything about their world was overexposed, on the surface.

One of my English professors had attended Stanford University. She felt that was the place for me to go—a place where intellect was valued over foolish fun and games and dress up, and finding a husband did not overshadow academic work. I had never thought about the state of California. Getting my parents to agree to my leaving Kentucky to attend a college in a nearby state had been hard enough. They had accepted a college they could reach by car, but a college thousands of miles away was beyond their imagination. Even I had difficulty grasping going that far away from home. The lure for me was the promise of journeying and arriving at a destination where I would be accepted and understood.

All the barely articulated understandings of class privilege that I had learned my first year of college had not hipped me to the reality of class shame. It still had not dawned on me that my parents, especially mama, resolutely refused to acknowledge any difficulties with money because her sense of shame around class was deep and intense. And when this shame was coupled with her need to feel that she had risen above the low-class backwoods culture of her family, it was impossible for her to talk in a straightforward manner about the strains it would put on the family for me to attend Stanford.

All I knew then was that, as with all my desires, I was told that this desire was impossible to fulfill. At first, it was not talked about in relation to money, it was talked about in relation to sin. California was an evil place, a modern-day Babylon where souls were easily seduced away from the path of righteousness. It was not a place for an innocent young girl to go on her own. Mama brought the message back that my father had absolutely refused to give permission.

I expressed my disappointment through ongoing unrelenting grief. I explained to mama that other parents wanted their children to go to good schools. It still had not dawned on me that my parents knew nothing about "good" schools. Even though I knew mama had not graduated from high school, I still held her in awe.

When my parents refused to permit me to attend Stanford, I accepted the verdict for awhile. Overwhelmed by grief, I could barely speak for weeks. Mama intervened and tried to change my father's mind, as folks sherespected in the outside world told her what a privilege it was for me to have this opportunity, that Stanford University was a good school for a smart girl. Without their permission, I decided I would go. And even though she did not give her approval, mama was willing to help.

My decision made conversations about money necessary. Mama explained that California was too far away, that it would always "cost" to get there, that if something went wrong, they would not be able to come and rescue me, that I would not be able to come home for holidays. I heard all this, but its meaning did not sink in. I was just relieved I would not be returning to the women's college, to the place where I had truly been an outsider.

There were other black students at Stanford. There was even a dormitory where many black students lived. I did not know I could choose to live there. I went where I was assigned. Going to Stanford was the first time I flew somewhere. Only mama stood and waved farewell as I left to take the bus to the airport. I left with a heavy heart, feeling both excitement and dread. I knew nothing about the world I was journeying to. Not knowing made me afraid, but my fear of staying in place was greater.

I had no idea what was ahead of me. In small ways, I was ignorant. I had never been on an escalator, a city bus, an airplane, or a subway. I arrived in San Francisco with no understanding that Palo Alto was a long drive away—that it would take money to find transportation there. I decided to take the city bus. With all my cheap overpacked bags, I must have seemed like just another innocent immigrant when I struggled to board the bus.

This was a city bus with no racks for luggage. It was filled with immigrants. English was not spoken. I felt lost and afraid. Without words the strangers surrounding me understood the universal language of need and distress. They reached for my bags, holding and helping. In return, I told them my story—that I had left my village in the South to come to Stanford University and that, like them, my family were workers.

On arriving, I called home. Before I could speak, I began to weep as I heard the faraway sound of mama's voice. I tried to find the words, to slow down, to tell her how it felt to be a stranger, to speak my uncertainty and longing. She told me this is the lot I had chosen. I must live with it. After her words, there was only silence. She had hung up on me—let me go into this world where I am a stranger still.

Stanford University was a place where one could learn about class from the ground up. Built by a man who believed in hard work, it was to have been a place where students of all classes would come, women and men, to work together and learn. It was to be a place of equality and communalism. His vision was seen by many as almost communist. The fact that he was rich made it all less threatening. Perhaps no one really believed the vision could be realized. The university was named after his son, who had died young, a son who had carried his name but who had no future money could buy. No amount of money can keep death away. But it could keep memory alive.

Everything in the landscape of my new world fascinated me, the plants brought from a rich man's travels all over the world back to this place of water and clay. At Stanford University, adobe buildings blend with Japanese plum trees and leaves of kumquat. On my way to study medieval literature, I ate my first kumquat. Surrounded by flowering cactus and a South American shrub bougainvillea of such trailing beauty it took my breath away, I was in a landscape of dreams, full of hope and possibility. If nothing else would hold me, I would not remain a stranger to the earth. The ground I stood on would know me.

Class was talked about behind the scenes. The sons and daughters from rich, famous, or notorious families were identified. The grown-ups in charge of us were always looking out for a family who might give their millions to the college. At Stanford, my classmates wanted to know me, thought it hip, cute, and downright exciting to have a black friend. They invited me on the expensive vacations and ski trips I could not afford. They offered to pay. I never went. Along with other students who were not from privileged families, I searched for places to go during the holiday times when the dormitory was closed. We got together and talked about the assumption that everyone had money to travel and would necessarily be leaving. The staff would be on holiday as well, so all students had to leave. Now and then the staff did not leave, and we were allowed to stick around. Once, I went home with one of the women who cleaned for the college.

Now and then, when she wanted to make extra money, mama would work as a maid. Her decision to work outside the home was seen as an act of treason by our father. At Stanford, I was stunned to find that there were maids who came by regularly to vacuum and tidy our rooms. No one had ever cleaned up behind me, and I did not want them to. At first I roomed with another girl from a working-class background—a beautiful white girl from Orange County who looked like pictures I had seen on the cover of Seventeen magazine. Her mother had died of cancer during her high-school years, and she had since been raised by her father. She had been asked by the college officials if she would find it problematic to have a black roommate. A scholarship student like myself, she knew her preferences did not matter and, as she kept telling me, she did not really care.

Like my friend during freshman year, she shared the understanding of what it was like to be a have-not in a world of haves. But unlike me, she was determined to become one of them. If it meant she had to steal nice clothes to look the same as they did, she had no problem taking these risks. If it meant having a privileged boyfriend who left bruises on her body now and then, it was worth the risk. Cheating was worth it. She believed the world the privileged had created was all unfair—all one big cheat; to get ahead, one had to play the game. To her, I was truly an innocent, a lamb being led to the slaughter. It did not surprise her one bit when I began to crack under the pressure of contradictory values and longings.

Like all students who did not have seniority, I had to see the school psychiatrists to be given permission to live off campus. Unaccustomed to being around strangers, especially strangers who did not share or understand my values, I found the experience of living in the dorms difficult. Indeed, almost everyone around me believed working-class folks had no values. At the university where the founder, Leland Stanford, had imagined different classes meeting on common ground, I learned how deeply individuals with class privilege feared and hated the working classes. Hearing classmates express contempt and hatred toward people who did not come from the right backgrounds shocked me.

To survive in this new world of divided classes, this world where I was also encountering for the first time a black bourgeois elite that was as contemptuous of working people as their white counterparts were, I had to take a stand, to get clear my own class affiliations. This was the most difficult truth to face. Having been taught all my life to believe that black people were inextricably bound in solidarity by our struggles to end racism, I did not know how to respond to elitist black people who were full of contempt for anyone who did not share their class, their way of life.

At Stanford, I encountered for the first time a black diaspora. Of the few black professors present, the vast majority were from African or Caribbean backgrounds. Elites themselves, they were only interested in teaching other elites. Poor folks like myself, with no background to speak of, were invisible. We were not seen by them or anyone else. Initially, I went to all meetings welcoming black students, but when I found no one to connect with, I retreated. In the shadows, I had time and books to teach me about the nature of class—about the ways black people were divided from themselves.

Despite this rude awakening, my disappointment at finding myself estranged from the group of students I thought would understand, I still looked for connections. I met an older black male graduate student who also came from a working-class background. Even though he had gone to the right high school, a California school for gifted students, and then to Princeton as an undergraduate, he understood intimately the intersections of race and class. Good in sports and in the classroom, he had been slotted early on to go far, to go where other black males had not gone. He understood the system. Academically, he fit. Had he wanted to, he could have been among the elite, but he chose to be on the margins, to hang with an intellectual artistic avant-garde. He wanted to live in a world of the mind where there was no race or class. He wanted to worship at the throne of art and knowledge. He became my mentor, comrade, and companion.

Slowly, I began to understand fully that there was no place in academe for folks from working-class backgrounds who did not wish to leave the past behind. That was the price of the ticket. Poor students would be welcome at the best institutions of higher learning only if they were willing to surrender memory, to forget the past and claim the assimilated present as the only worthwhile and meaningful reality.

Students from nonprivileged backgrounds who did not want to forget often had nervous breakdowns. They could not bear the weight of all the contradictions they had to confront. They were crushed. More often than not, they dropped out with no trace of their inner anguish recorded, no institutional record of the myriad ways their take on the world was assaulted by an elite vision of class and privilege. The records merely indicated that, even after receiving financial aid and other support, these students simply could not make it, simply were not good enough.

At no time in my years as a student did I march in a graduation ceremony. I was not proud to hold degrees from institutions where I had been constantly scorned and shamed. I wanted to forget these experiences, to erase them from my consciousness. Like a prisoner set free, I did not want to remember my years on the inside. When I finished my doctorate, I felt too much uncertainty about who I had become. Uncertain about whether I had managed to make it through without giving up the best of myself, the best of the values I had been raised to believe in—hard work, honesty, and respect for everyone no matter their class—I finished my education with my allegiance to the working class intact. Even so, I had planted my feet on the path leading in the direction of class privilege. There would always be contradictions to face. There would always be confrontations around the issue of class. I would always have to reexamine where I stand.

bell hooks is a writer whose recent books include All About Love: New Visions (William Morrow, 2000) and the children's book Happy to Be Nappy (Hyperion, 1999). This article is adapted from where we stand: class matters, being published this month by Routledge.

A JOURNEY TO CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

Oftentimes, I, too, am afraid to think and write about class. I began my journey to class consciousness as a college student learning about the politics of the American left, reading Marx, Fanon, Gramsci, Memmi, the little red book, and so on. But when my studies ended, I still felt my language to be inadequate. I still found it difficult to make sense of class in relation to race and gender. Even now, the intellectual left in this nation looks down on anyone who does not speak the chosen jargon. The domain of academic and/or intellectual discourse about class is still mostly white, mostly male. While a few women get to have their say, most of the time men do not really listen. Most leftist men will not fully recognize the left politics of revolutionary feminism: To them, class remains the only issue. Within revolutionary feminism, a class analysis matters, but so does an analysis of race and gender.

Class matters. Race and gender can be used as screens to deflect attention away from the harsh realities class politics exposes. Clearly, just when we should all be paying attention to class, using race and gender to understand and explain its new dimensions, society, even our government, says let's talk about race and racial injustice. It is impossible to talk meaningfully about ending racism without talking about class. Let us not be duped. Let us not be led by spectacles like the O.J. Simpson trial to believe a mass media, which has always betrayed the cause of racial justice, to think that it was all about race, or it was about gender. Let's face the reality that, if O.J. Simpson had been poor or even lower-middle class, there would have been no media attention. Justice was never the central issue.

It has been difficult for black folks to talk about class. Acknowledging class difference destabilizes the notion that racism affects us all in equal ways. It disturbs the illusion of racial solidarity among blacks, used by those individuals with class power to ensure that their class interests will be protected even as they transcend race behind the scenes.

Feminist theorists acknowledged the overwhelming significance of the interlocking systems of race, gender, and class long before men decided to talk more about these issues together. Yet mainstream culture, particularly mass media, was not willing to tune into a radical political discourse that was not privileging one issue over the other. Class is still often kept separate from race. And while race is often linked with gender, we still lack an ongoing collective public discourse that puts the three together in ways that illuminate for everyone how our nation is organized and what our class politics really are. Women of all races and black people of both genders are fast filling up the ranks of the poor and disenfranchised. It is in our interest to face the issue of class, to become more conscious, to know better, so that we can know how best to struggle for economic justice.

I began to write about class in an effort to clarify my own personal journey from a working-class background to the world of affluence, in an effort to be more class conscious. It has been useful to begin with class and work from there. In much of my other work, I have chosen gender or race as a starting point. I choose class now because I believe class warfare will be our nation's fate if we do not collectively challenge classism, if we do not attend to the widening gap between rich and poor, the haves and have-nots. This class conflict is already racialized and gendered. It is already creating division and separation. If the citizens of this nation want to live in a society that is class free, then we must first work to create an economic system that is just. To work for change, we need to know where we stand.

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Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, 2000.

Pink Pistols - Jonathan Rauch

2000-03-13T12:00:00.002+01:00

The gay movement often portrays homosexuals as helpless victims. Here's an alternative: Arm them.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

One night in the autumn of 1987, in Little Rock, Ark., a boy named Austin Fulk smelled his own death. He was 17, too young to drink in the bars, so he often hung out in a park that was popular among gay teenagers. On this night the sky was overcast, the ground soggy from a day's rain and the place mostly deserted. He was standing in a dimly lit parking lot, chatting with a man who had driven into town in a pickup truck.

A car drove past very slowly, sped up, turned around and came back. Someone inside yelled something like, "Fucking faggots, get AIDS and die!" Fulk's companion returned the compliment. The car slammed to a stop and four young men piled out, one with a baseball bat, another with a crowbar or tire iron.

"I thought I was about to die," says Austin; but he is alive, and that is because his companion reached into the truck and whipped out a pistol from under the seat, leveled it at the gay-bashers and fired a single shot over their heads. All at once, their courage deserted them. They ran back to their car and drove away.

Austin is one of two gay men I know who believe they were saved from death, or at least a long hospital stay, by guns. Guns, however, will play no part in the program for the gay and lesbian Millennium March that takes place April 30 in Washington. Early on, organizers of the march adopted eight "priority issues," with "hate-crimes legislative protections" first on the list.

A federal hate-crimes statute died in the Republican Congress last year, but mainstream voters and politicians are increasingly receptive. After 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was beaten, tied to a fence post and left to die in 1998, hate-crimes laws emerged as straight America's favorite gay-rights measure. Today almost half the states have bias-crimes laws that cover gay-bashing, and anyway, gay-bashing is already a crime in every state.

I won't quibble over the pros and cons of hate-crimes laws. In a way, I don't need to, because the numbers speak for themselves: the laws are at best insufficient, at worst ineffective. Anti-gay crimes reported to the FBI almost doubled between 1992 and 1998. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs monitors 16 jurisdictions and found 33 anti-gay murders in 1998, up from 14 in 1997. The coalition also found that gay-bashers were becoming more likely to use deadly weapons: guns, baseball bats, knives. There is not a city in America where gay couples can hold hands in public without fear. Gay-bashing is a kind of low-level terrorism designed to signal that, whatever the law may say, queers are pathetic and grotesque. Beyond a certain point, therefore, law can't be the answer.

So it is remarkable that the gay movement in America has never seriously considered a strategy that ought to be glaringly obvious. Thirty-one states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible.

John Lott of Yale University has done extensive research on concealed-gun laws and finds that they reduce violent crime, especially among minorities, who are at greater risk, and above all among women, who are otherwise perceived as easy targets. Even if you disbelieve his research for crime in general, remember that gay-bashers are probably especially ripe for deterrence. They aren't career criminals or super-predators. More often, they are drunken or rowdy youths who decide to prove their manhood by picking on the weakest, most limp-wristed thing they can think of: a faggot.

If it became widely known that homosexuals carry guns and know how to use them, not many bullets would need to be fired. In fact, not all that many gay people would need to carry guns, as long as gay-bashers couldn't tell which ones did. Suddenly, what is now an almost risk-free sport for testosterone-drenched teenagers would become a great deal less attractive.

Won't bullets fly in the streets? Won't blood flow in torrents? If that were going to happen, it would have happened by now. Today almost half of all Americans (and 60 percent of gun owners) live in states that license concealed weapons; abuse of lawfully carried guns turns out to be vanishingly rare. Remember, to get a permit you typically need to register with the police, pay a fee, pass a gun-safety test, have no criminal record, not be crazy and so on. In aggregate, people with concealed-gun permits handle their weapons more safely than off-duty cops.

No doubt some gay-bashers would respond by adding guns to their own arsenals (as they are already doing anyway). Lott's research suggests, however, that the effects of any such "arms races" are more than offset by criminals' desire to steer clear of potentially fatal confrontations. That finding, one can safely guess, applies doubly to gay-bashers, for whom the whole point is to beat up on someone weak. The last thing they want is to risk their lives in a firefight with a trained opponent.

So pink pistols can save lives, which is important. But -- and this is even more important -- they can also change lives.

To see this, consider a somewhat uncomfortable question. After decades of anti-gay killings, many of them unutterably savage, why was it the Shepard murder that finally became a cause celebre among heterosexual Americans?

Many reasons, of course. Shepard looked angelic and could have been anyone's child; the story of his agonizing deathbed countdown riveted attention; the crime and its symbolism were horrible and moving. But there is, I think, one more reason, which is not quite so innocuous. Shepard was small, helpless and childlike. He never had a chance. This made him a sympathetic figure of a sort that is comfortingly familiar to straight Americans: the weak homosexual.

Since time immemorial, weakness has been a defining stereotype of homosexuality. Think of the words you heard on the school playground: "limp-wrist," "pansy," "panty-waist," "fairy." No other minority has been so consistently identified with contemptible weakness. Hate-crimes laws, whatever their other attributes, do nothing to challenge the stereotype of the pathetic faggot. Indeed, they confirm it. By running to the heterosexual majority for protection, homosexuals reaffirm their vulnerability and victimhood.

If anti-Semites hate Israel, that is in no small measure because Israel shattered the ancient stereotype of the helpless and sniveling Jew. Jews with an army! Jews who fight back! You can hate Israel all you like, but you don't bully it. Israel changed the way Jews see themselves, and it changed the way gentiles see Jews.

Guns can do the same thing for homosexuals: emancipate them from their image -- often internalized -- of cringing weakness. Pink pistols, I'll warrant, would do far more for the self-esteem of the next generation of gay men and women than any number of hate-crime laws or anti-discrimination statutes.

I don't advocate a swaggering or confrontational attitude toward the American majority, or for that matter toward gay-bashers. Gays shouldn't play Dirty Harry. I also don't favor abandoning other efforts to mobilize law and public opinion against violence. Pink pistols are a kind of civil-rights measure, but they are fully compatible with other, more traditional kinds of civil-rights measures.

Still, the abiding fact is this: Homosexuals have been too vulnerable for too long. We have tried to make a political virtue of our vulnerability, but the gay-bashers aren't listening. Playing the victim card has won us sympathy, but at the cost of respect. So let's make gay-bashing dangerous. We should do that for our own protection. But we should also do it because we will win a full measure of esteem from the public, and from ourselves, only when we make clear our determination to look after ourselves.

Austin Fulk now lives in Virginia. He is a certified pistol instructor and is licensed to carry a concealed firearm. He has never had to use it.

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salon.com, March 13, 2000. Jonathan Rauch, a columnist for National Journal magazine, is a contributing writer for the Independent Gay Forum. He lives in Washington, where it is illegal to carry or buy a handgun.

Rainbow Noose Now With Free Lambda Gag! (Justice in the Matthew Shepard Murder Trial)

1999-12-01T12:00:00.002+01:00

n.a. (NB: If you know the name of the author of this piece, please write and tell me so that I can name him/her.)

Did the politics of hate-crime and a thirst for vengeance short-shrift justice in the trial of Aaron McKinney?

On November 3rd, a Laramie jury convicted the 22-year-old roofer of second-degree murder and other charges, including some that subjected him to the death penalty, stemming from last year’s beating death of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. No one, McKinney included, contests his role in the crime. But some gay activists and civil libertarians are now questioning how Shepard’s parents became key players in the trial, virtually dictating the plea bargain that short-circuited it after the jury’s verdict. In a highly unusual deal, McKinney gives up all rights to appeal his conviction and agrees that neither he nor his attorneys will ever publicly speak about the case. In exchange, McKinney avoids execution, and receives two consecutive life terms without possibility of parole.

Aaron McKinney’s trial was never about whether he killed Matthew Shepard. In his confession to police shortly after the murder, McKinney admitted that he, together with Russell Henderson, picked up Shepard at a Laramie bar, went driving, and then beat him into a coma, leaving him tied onto a fence to die. Henderson accepted a plea bargain last April that imposed two consecutive life sentences. The reason such a deal wasn’t offered McKinney from the start was the desire of Shepard’s family to have McKinney executed— an end never questioned by the anti-hate and gay rights groups that flocked to Laramie to spin news reporting of the most notorious anti-gay crime in American history.

The death penalty is not a gay issue, insists the Human Rights Campaign, the most prominent of the organizations working the press in Laramie. The HRC has repeated that position ever since the outcry over Matthew Shepard’s murder raised the likelihood that prosecutors would seek capital punishment for his killers. The HRC’s stance puts it at odds with every major international organization with human rights in its mandate. But in fact, they, together with the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and various hate-crimes groups were taking a stand on the death penalty by using McKinney’s trial, whose raison d’être was blood revenge, as a political soapbox in support of hate-crime laws.

Keeping Shepard’s murder a "perfect" hate crime— one based solely on Shepard’s identity with nothing to do with sex— was a concern paramount not only to the gay and lesbian groups, but also to Albany County prosecutor Cal Rerucha, who hewed to the wishes of Shepard’s parents. "At no time did Mr. Rerucha make any decision on the outcome of this case without the permission of Judy and me," Matthew Shepard’s father told the court at McKinnney’s sentencing. "It was our decision to take this case to trial just as it was our decision to accept the plea bargain today and the earlier plea bargain of Mr. Henderson."

Throughout the trial, Rerucha’s legal strategy was to muzzle McKinney and his public defenders, who pleaded for the life of their client on grounds that Shepard’s killing was unplanned and committed in anger. McKinney had been coerced as a boy into homosexual activity by a neighborhood bully, his attorneys said, and he flew off the handle at a sexual groping from Shepard. But DA Rerucha objected and Judge Barton Voigt agreed, disallowing the "gay panic" defense on the grounds that Wyoming law makes no allowance for temporary insanity. The judge ruled, however, that factors affecting McKinney’s state of mind could be introduced as an exculpatory factor at a sentencing hearing.

Even though jurors only heard the "panic" defense adumbrated in opening arguments, they elected not to convict McKinney on premeditated murder— a strong signal they would not vote to execute in the trial’s penalty phase. The Shepards’ sudden consent to a plea bargain of life imprisonment at this point was less a humanitarian gesture, as most media reported, than a realization they would fail to get the death sentence they sought. An arranged plea would allow them to dictate the terms, and also avoid a sentencing hearing in which McKinney could once again claim that Shepard made a sexual approach.

There are reasons to doubt that Shepard made the moves on his killers, or that if he did, that’s what provoked their violence. Only Shepard’s murderers know what happened, and they have little credibility and much reason to construct self-serving scenarios. However, these are matters juries are called upon to weigh. McKinney deserved to put this evidence before the jury as part of his right to due process. The notion that Shepard’s killing was not just murder but a "hate crime" also made the question of Shepard’s possible come-on crucial. The ideology of "hate crimes" demands abstract prejudice alone, and makes killing someone for making a pass a less invalid reason for murder.

The Shepards’ muzzling of McKinney was a terrible precedent, not only undermining his First Amendment rights, but the right of all of us to know more than the Shepards’ preferred version of the murder. Having lost the chance to deprive him of his life, the Shepards demanded a plea-bargain that muzzles McKinney’s humanity. One of the reasons for not killing evildoers is the potential everyone has to change and grow. If McKinney develops new perspective on his actions in the decades to come, no one will share his insights. Yet such understanding would benefit all who care about preventing future anti-gay violence.

The state prosecutes criminal acts in the name of all the people, not just the wronged individual, his or her family, or a particular community. Despite its flaws, the rule of law is universally preferred over the interminable feuding of rival clans that is typical in the absence of central authority. But the ideology of "victims’ rights" and "hate crimes" insists that impartiality and fairness are not enough, that certain individuals and groups, and not others, require special privilege. That this is a step backward into clan conflict can be seen in how the McKinney trial put the Shepards’ private, perfectly understandable quest for honor and revenge at the center of a judicial proceeding, where it did not belong. While these distortions served seemingly the side friendly to gay people and against those violently hateful, the best safeguard for despised minorities— and everyone— is real justice.

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The Guide [Boston, Massachusetts]
December, 1999

Barebacking And The New Aids Hysteria - Eric Rofes

1999-04-07T00:00:00.003+02:00

Eric Rofes, who died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on June 26, 2006, was one of those white, privileged gay men who benefited considerably from his privilege and who quite frequently forgot where he was writing from. But that didn't make him wrong. At least not always. Even though calling Michelangelo Signorile “nutty” in this 1999 article demonstrates the degree to which Rofes was symptomatic for black pot/black kettle disease, he was still smart--and prescient. (And, of course, my vote automatically goes to anyone who criticizes the crackpot gay press and its pitiful, shameful performance during two decades of an AIDS epidemic.) That’s why ”Barebacking And The New Aids Hysteria” is something you gotta read.

AIDS Leaders Defame Gay Men, Misread Data, and Demand a Crisis Mentality.
Is It Any Wonder Gay Men Are Tuning Them Out?

When the February issue of POZ magazine hit the stands, it immediately generated a high-volume debate in gay communities throughout the nation. The national AIDS glossy featured a photo of HIV-positive model and activist Tony Valenzuela, buffed, beautiful, and naked on a black steed, and the cover read, “Tony Valenzuela and the boys who Bareback take you on a ride inside.” Barebacking, the theme of the issue, is a popularized term used to describe anal sex without condoms or, alternately, the small subculture of men who throw parties, visit websites, and increasingly adopt identities focused on the thrill of sexing without condoms. The POZ issue contains a powerful column by the magazine’s publisher, defending his publication’s discussion of the subject; an interview with Valenzuela; and an ethnographic piece by author and gay health advocate Michael Scarce, focused on a visit to a barebacking party in San Francisco.

POZ's supposed “glamorization” of an act closely linked to HIV transmission, and the alleged danger posed by Scarce’s sidebar “Safer Barebacking Considerations,” the brouhaha has brought to the forefront a widening chasm among gay men working to prevent HIV transmissions.

Two visions rooted in vastly different understandings of gay men’s relationship to the epidemic have been advanced in the last few years: one argues that even as the medical syndrome of HIV/AIDS continues, the crisis stage of AIDS has passed for gay men; the other berates gay men for moving away from AIDS-crisis mindsets or taking even a single step out of the bomb shelters we’ve inhabited since the early 1980s. The debate over these two visions is fierce and personal, and daunting questions have emerged: What are these divisive debates really about? Are they another example of internecine warfare driven by personality conflicts, ego battles, and bad manners? Why is gay men’s sex once again the target of demonization?

Scarce, who will speak at “The Rubberless Fuck,” a Gay City Health Project forum about barebacking (Thursday, April 15 at Oddfellows Hall), is one of the few thinkers trying to honestly answer these questions, and the only one who has engaged in social science research into this frequently mischaracterized subculture.

New Rules

From the mid-1980s forward, those trying to control the spread of HIV among gay males have counted on a variety of “facts” about AIDS to shift the way we have sex. Because few gay men survived more than a year or two after an AIDS diagnosis, we discussed HIV-infection as lethal and considered each friend who tested positive to be facing a death sentence. As the tidal wave of deaths hit urban centers from 1989-1994, frequent funerals and memorial services drove home the fatal dangers gay men faced when taking risks with sex or needles. When we reached the point where 50 percent of men in the gay ghettos of San Francisco and New York were HIV-positive, AIDS groups constantly reminded gay men that half of their sex partners were likely to be infected, and instructed us to use condoms without fail. These early HIV-prevention efforts were acclaimed internationally because they quickly and skillfully funneled often confusing medical and epidemiological data into easy-to-digest campaigns tailored to the various gay male populations. They were truthful, and they were highly effective.

Today, many of our leading AIDS organizations are asking gay men to believe we are in the same crisis we entered in 1985, despite the fact that the number of diagnoses and deaths are declining. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the incidence of AIDS among gay men declined 18 percent from ‘96 to ‘97, and deaths declined 49 percent. Yet AIDS organizations demand that the “facts” of the 1980s guide our sexual practices today. And they contradict themselves in the treatment arena: They’ll throw a pep rally for HIV-positive men, presenting optimistic visions of current and future pharmaceuticals, while, at the same time, they’ll scare HIV-negative men with horror stories about side effects and supposedly high rates of treatment failure.

The “facts” of the mid-1980s are not the facts of the late 1990s. The pages of weekly gay papers are not filled with obituaries anymore, and everyone we know who tested HIV-positive in the 1980s is not dead. A syndrome once considered lethal to every carrier of the virus has been undermined not only by the new drug cocktail, but by a range of other aggressive treatments and health promotion activities, and by the undeniable presence of “long-term non-progressors” in our midsts: those infected for more than a decade who retain fully intact immune systems that have somehow stifled viral replication. We now believe many HIV-positive men will never develop AIDS.

The percentage of gay men populating bars, bathhouses, e-mail chat rooms, and gay dating services who are infected is no longer 50 percent, as it once was in New York City and San Francisco. That figure is under 15 percent in most urban centers, and in those high-impact cities of the 1980s, fewer than 25 percent of gay men are HIV-positive.

In 1999, many gay men are engaging in sexual practices informed by current realities, even if they are not as conservative in their behavior as many prevention advocates would like. Most of the men we have sex with are not likely to be HIV-positive, and many HIV-positive men have diminished levels of HIV in their semen, due to new treatments. While still awful and life-threatening, becoming infected with HIV is no longer an assurance of imminent decline or tantamount to a death sentence. HIV-positive gay men are aware that medical researchers continue to disagree about the danger or even the possibility of their re-infection with more dangerous strains of HIV. Even the National Institutes of Health have told us that the statistical risk from a single act of unprotected sex is much less than the 50 percent risk many of us believed it was in the 1980s.

Ten Pounds of Prevention

If HIV-prevention efforts are less effective today than they were a decade ago, it may be because much of the current work refuses to fully accept the altered realities in which today’s gay men operate. Those who are having sex without condoms are not lacking in self-esteem or filled with internalized homophobia that triggers them to self-destruct. Nor are they necessarily naive or delusional, believing they are invulnerable to harm or disease. Even those few HIV-prevention programs that have moved into the 1990s, like Gay City in Seattle, which should be commended for organizing the barebacking forum and promoting discussion of the issue, have failed to fully re-envision what an authentic new generation of HIV-prevention efforts might look like. Many groups are finding it difficult to invent models of public health that are not dependent on creating a community mindset of crisis, or that rely on terror, panic, shame, and guilt as primary tools.

Recent articles in local papers and statements by Gay City’s leadership suggest this lack of vision may be hampering effective prevention efforts in Seattle. In one recent article in the Seattle Gay News, Gay City’s director discusses his placement of “bogus personal ads” seeking partners for bareback sex (he received “a large number of responses”), the supposed source of many new infections, yet also insists, “We are seeing a lot of new infections within committed relationships.” Are we so desperate to convince gay men that they’re still living under a state of emergency that we point our fingers everywhere, one moment at the sex pigs and the other at men in couples?

A recent media alert from Gay City stated that “alarming HIV-infection rates among gay men” in the early and mid-1990s inspired the founding of the group, yet their barebacking forum materials reference similar “alarming” new infections today. Like many AIDS organizations, Gay City crafts an explanation-of-the-moment for continuing infections among gay men (It’s low self-esteem! It’s gay men who think AIDS is over! It’s those barebackers! It’s those crystal users! It’s that youthful sense of invulnerability!) in an attempt to extend—year-by-year—the crisis-driven experience of AIDS among gay men into a new millennium.

My concern with the popular use of the term “crisis” as a description of gay men’s current experience with HIV/AIDS centers on the fact that in the past 20 years, AIDS among gay men has morphed from the short-term crisis we expected it to be to a long-term endemic challenge. Such challenges demand very different public health responses. It’s also important to note that as the mainstream gay community has exited, other communities in the United States are entering the crisis stage of response to HIV/AIDS, particularly urban African American and Latino populations, including many black and Latino gay men. Yet white gay men remain the dominant power base within the AIDS system nationally, and frequently resist relinquishing significant power and resources to these other communities.

Seattle Gay News has done its part to fan the flames of crisis and ensure that thoughtful analysis of gay men’s sexual health rarely appears in its pages. Associate Editor Tom Flint insists that barebacking “is a real problem,” and argues that his newspaper needs “to bring it out into the open.” Yet Flint’s paper feels no parallel obligation to discuss the topic with intelligence or critical analysis. While there is no dearth of thoughtful health activists, researchers, epidemiologists, and gay men’s health providers in the Northwest, Seattle Gay News devotes its two front-page stories on barebacking to an interview with Michaelangelo Signorile, a nutty New York journalist who has never worked in HIV prevention.

In a bizarre, take-no-prisoners interview, Signorile attributes new infections among gay men to no less than 10 sources: the “glamorization” of barebacking, a “spoiled-brat” mentality among gay men, the failure of prevention campaigns to use fear tactics, ads for protease inhibitors presenting images of buff men with AIDS, the supposed claims of gay writers—Andrew Sullivan and myself—that “AIDS is over,” young gay men’s lack of personal experience with AIDS deaths, pro-gay policies of the Clinton administration, the transgressive nature of gay men’s sexuality, young men’s self-indulgence, and the immaturity of gay men’s cultures. Grabbing at straws to find an explanation for a phenomenon he can neither define nor comprehend, Signorile is promoted as the leading voice on the barebacking “issue” to the readership of Seattle Gay News.

Willful Misreading of Data

Daniel Zingale, Executive Director of AIDS Action, the DC-based political arm of what’s left of the AIDS movement, has been much in the media lately, discussing what he believes is a huge shift in gay men’s sexual practices, based on a recent report from the CDC in Atlanta. When the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of January 29, 1999 led off with a synthesis of recent studies under the headline “Increases in Unsafe Sex and Rectal Gonorrhea among Men Who Have Sex with Men—San Francisco, California, 1994-1997,” they did so out of their mission to serve as sort of a Paul Revere and herald what they believe are dangerous trends in sexual behavior. I look to our nation’s AIDS leadership to interpret the CDC’s bulletin critically and frame it in useful ways, rather than simply amplify and extend their conclusions.

Zingale interprets the CDC’s report showing a rise in the rectal gonorrhea rate among gay men in San Francisco and an increase in gay men reporting unprotected anal sex as the result of a “national complacency” and young gay men who “are cavalier in their attitude about both recreational drug use and HIV risk.” Reading the recent epidemiological reports (on which the CDC report draws) through the crisis-tinted lenses of AIDS Inc., he cannot imagine two men fucking without condoms as anything other than “a romanticizing of unsafe sex.”

Seattle Gay News promptly followed suit. Drawing very loosely on those same CDC studies, as well as on documents from the Seattle/King County Health Department, Flint writes, “Newly documented information shows that STDs and HIV are increasing among gay men in Seattle and across the United States. Many therefore fear a new tide of suffering and death which may strike a new generation of gay men, just when it appeared we might have turned the corner of the epidemic and put the worst of the AIDS epidemic behind us.”

The recently released studies from the CDC upon which Zingale and Flint base their hysteria may be cause for concern, but not in the narrow ways they are suggesting. The study of increased rates of rectal gonorrhea in San Francisco has been universally read as indicative of increasing new HIV infections among gay men, yet the study contrasts strangely with HIV-infection rates in San Francisco, which show not a rise but a decline and leveling off of new infections among gay men since the mid-1990s. A good portion of these new cases of rectal gonorrhea could be among men already infected with HIV. If so, what’s needed is less AIDS hysteria and more general sexually transmitted disease prevention campaigns.

And while the press reported this rise of gonorrhea as “a return to the 1970s,” almost all journalists failed to note that San Francisco’s infection rate is still a tiny percentage of what it was before the education work of the 1980s. At a San Francisco forum on barebacking last August, staff from Stop AIDS, a pioneering gay men’s prevention project in San Francisco, acknowledged that—even with this supposedly shocking rise in rectal gonorrhea cases—the 200 cases reported in 1997 are nowhere near the 9,000 reported annually during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, these “alarming” new rectal gonorrhea rates are below three percent of what we faced in that pre-AIDS period.

Likewise, the much ballyhooed upswing in gay men reporting unprotected anal sex (from 30 percent in 1994 to 39 percent in 1997) can only be understood as a “problem” if one maintains the AIDS absolutist position of the 1980s: Good gay men use a condom every time. This “upswing” in reported unprotected anal sex could suggest many things other than the future tidal wave of new HIV infections predicted by the press and AIDS Inc. In fact, it could mean no upswing at all, but simply that more gay men are reporting unprotected sex, or that more HIV-positive men are engaging in unprotected sex with each other, which would have little implication for new transmissions.

As social scientists are aware, a person’s response to surveys is linked to current cultural norms. A gay man, like other people, will tell researchers what he thinks they want to hear. In the 1980s, all gay men in the media represented themselves as having 100 percent safe sex, 100 percent of the time. Today, some gay men speak openly about unprotected butt sex and debates flare over barebacking subcultures. This new discourse makes it safer for surveyed gay men to “‘fess up” and tell researchers the truth about the sex they may be having. The “upswing” could also suggest that more gay men are aware that there are lower levels of HIV in gay communities—sometimes men choose to get fucked without condoms in circumstances where they do the mental calculations and assess that their risk of being infected is minimal.

I am not arguing that the sexual practices of gay men raise no significant and serious concerns around health or that the new treatments are a panacea. I simply think that pushing a state-of-emergency mindset takes its toll, and drives new infections up rather than reducing them. The obsessive marketing campaigns telling us to “use a condom 100 percent of the time” have made anal sex more central to gay men’s desires, and have exacerbated the challenge rather than mitigating it.

I believe the willful misreading of epidemiological data, the continued churning out of crisis-based press releases, and the escalating depiction of gay men—particularly young gay men—as dumb, self-destructive, and responsible for undercutting the assimilation-based, best-little-boy progress of the “responsible” gay community, have enormous consequences in terms of gay men’s health. These factors will also hamper effective community organizing and further contribute to the declining credibility of gay community institutions among gay men—especially young gay men.

Who’s being lazy, irresponsible, and self-destructive here? Gay men in their 20s and 30s, or AIDS Inc.? It’s easier to blame new infections on young gay men, mischaracterizing all whose sex falls outside the narrow dictates of use-a-condom-every-time mantras, than it is to take a fearless look at the current state of prevention.

Prevention efforts targeting gay men are sorely in need of re-visioning and re-direction. We don’t need more brochures, more programs to improve our supposedly sagging self-esteem, or more sound bites and marketing messages. Gay men need a multi-issue, multicultural gay men’s health movement.

Rather than portraying us as panic-stricken victims living in crisis, AIDS organizations could conceptualize gay men as resilient survivors (of AIDS as well as homophobia). Rather than invent an emergency-of-the-year, such groups should adopt a long-term, sustained approach to health promotion, embedding HIV-prevention efforts in broader, meaningful programs focused on sexually transmitted diseases, heart disease, cancer, and addiction. They should explore issues of aging, diet, exercise, and spirituality, and grapple with the ways in which issues of masculinity play out in our social and sexual practices. As much energy and as many resources should flow into gay men’s strengths and victories as is directed toward their failings and defeats.

By misrepresenting gay men who organize their sex and relationships outside of the crisis-driven dictates of 1980s prevention, AIDS leaders and journalists cross an important line. In a political climate of homophobia and sexphobia, they’re using an all-too-willing mainstream media to divide gay men into good and bad. And if they wonder why popular support for AIDS groups is plummeting among gay men, they need look no further than their own press releases. AIDS organizations that patronize and defame gay men should not be shocked when gay men no longer support their efforts. Instead of bringing together a savvy and creative brain-trust to create a multi-issue health movement, AIDS organizations point fingers at the bad boys (barebackers, circuit boys, and those lazy, self-centered young queers) and continue to see AIDS work as somehow separate from the broader public health context in which we live. Instead of creating a new generation of HIV-prevention messages rooted in the altered (and ever-changing) facts of HIV infection, AIDS organizations recycle the education models and supposedly common-sense assumptions of the 1980s, while making—at best—mild adjustments.

An ever-widening gap has opened between rank-and-file gay men and the institutions which many of us created, funded, and staffed as volunteers. Until AIDS leaders cease to patronize the common gay man by presenting us with “facts” that have little likeness to the realities of our lives or the findings of balanced biomedical research, and until they cease to treat us with contempt, they ensure the further erosion of their funding and volunteer base in gay communities.

This is why Michael Scarce’s visit to Seattle may be critical to the redirection of local prevention efforts. Scarce will be publishing a landmark book this June, entitled Smearing the Queer, which critically examines a range of health issues facing gay men and argues for an activist approach to health promotion. In his upcoming book and hopefully in his appearance in Seattle next week, Scarce provides a vision motivated by an appreciation for gay male cultures and a commitment to gay men’s health and survival. Scarce is likely to be one of the most important leaders in the emerging gay health movement.

The Stranger, April 7, 1999
(Seattle Free Weekly)

The Holy War on Gays - Robert Dreyfuss

1999-03-18T12:00:00.001+01:00

Lily Tomlin once quipped, "No matter how paranoid I get, I worry that it’s never enough to keep up." Robert Dreyfuss’ "The Holy War on Gays,” from the Village Voice of March 18, 1999, illustrates her point. “The Christian Right is on a new mission: to drive homosexuality back into the closet. Inside the war rooms of evangelical intolerance....”

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On a stormy day in mid-January 1996, about twenty leaders of the Christian right wing met in the basement of a Baptist church in Memphis.

Representing such large organizations as the Rev. Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, the Mississippi-based American Family Association and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, the activists had come together to launch an anti-homosexual network, which they called the National Pro-Family Forum. What drove them the most that day was their alarm over a growing friendliness in America to the idea of gay and lesbian marriages. Brainstorming during the course of a nine-hour discussion, they hammered out a national strategy to combat America’s increasing tolerance of homosexuality. And since then, meeting three or four times a year, the expanding group has coordinated a powerful counteroffensive to the gay-rights movement.

A few weeks after its initial meeting, the National Pro-Family Forum’s first action splashed onto the national scene during the February Iowa residential caucuses. Christian-right activists invited Republican presidential candidates to appear at an event held in a church in Des Moines, Iowa, where, in front of more than 200 reporters, each candidate signed a pledge declaring his opposition to gay marriage. “No one was paying attention to the issue of same-sex marriages up to that point,” says Phil Burress, a Cincinnati activist who organized the Memphis meeting. “And then all of a sudden bam! This was an issue that was being debated nationwide!”

And the center of that debate was the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which defines marriage in federal law as the union of a man and a woman. The bill was sketched out at the Memphis gathering; it was refined in the weeks afterward by Robert Knight, director of cultural studies at the Family Research Council, with help from Christian legal scholars, including the National Legal Foundation in Virginia, founded by Robertson.

Designed as a response to the consideration of gay marriages by Hawaiian courts, DOMA is an effort to prevent the legal authority of such unions from spreading to the continental United States; it also precludes same-sex couples from receiving federal spousal benefits. The bill sailed through Congress, spearheaded by Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., ironically twice divorced and thrice married himself. And, with apparent reluctance, President Bill Clinton went along. “The president signed it in the middle of the night, in the wee hours,” says Knight. “And only after [then-White House spokesman Mike] McCurry called it a hate-driven bill.” Since 1996, twenty-eight states have passed parallel legislation, ensuring that they would not have to recognize gay marriages approved by any other state.

The 1996 candidate pledges in Iowa and the passage of DOMA were the opening shots in a nationwide campaign, fueled by the Christian right, to roll back gains won by gay activists since the 1980s. Marshaling a political and religious force 30 million strong, who fervently believe that the Bible demands that they condemn homosexuality, the network of Christian right groups is trying to slam the door on America’s uncomfortable but increasing acceptance of gays and lesbians. Its leaders predict society’s collapse if the gay-rights agenda were to succeed. Sincere, passionate and implacable sometimes seemingly obsessed, the anti-gay movement sees gay rights as a pink dagger aimed at the heart of American family life.

In January 1998, the Christian right provided a convincing demonstration of its ability to inspire its voters to the polls. A wicked ice storm had coated Maine in a frozen blanket that felled trees, snapped power lines and paralyzed roads across the state. It was a storm-of-the-century event, trapping thousands in their homes and closing businesses and schools. But on February 10th, led by legions of motivated Christians, voters ignored the ice and turned out for a special election; they overturned Maine’s 1997 Human Rights Act by a margin of four percent. That law, passed less than a year earlier, prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in jobs, housing, credit and public accommodations.

The vote was a stunning victory for the state chapters of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Civic League, the two groups that had petitioned for the referendum. Maine’s political establishment and gay-rights groups across the country were stunned. “The opposition did not realize the extent of our grassroots movement,” says Paul Volle, who heads the Christian Coalition of Maine. Until last summer, however, the Christian right’s anti-gay crusade operated largely Out of view, bursting into the open when full-scale political battles like Maine’s—and others in Colorado, Oregon, Ohio and elsewhere—flared up. Since the fall of ‘997, when openly gay San Francisco philanthropist James Hormel was first nominated to be ambassador to Luxembourg, anti-gay forces have been protesting, warning darkly that he would be a spokesman for the “homosexual agenda.” Despite their concerns, he was recently renominated.

Last July, things became very public when fifteen organizations belonging to the National Pro-Family Forum launched the Truth in Love campaign, a $500,000 advertising blitz in national newspapers proclaiming that homosexuals “can change,” featuring “ex-gays” who have “walked out of homosexuality into sexual celibacy or even marriage.”

A who’s who of anti-gay groups sponsored the ad campaign—from the Christian Coalition, the AFA, the FRC and Americans for Truth About Homosexuality—as well as large, media-savvy Christian churches like Coral Ridge Ministries, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The ads drew withering fire from gay-rights activists, who called them hate-filled and homophobic, which the sponsors bitterly deny. And the media, drawn to conflict, gave wide exposure to the ads, from Newsweek (a cover story) to People and ABC’s Nightline.

Then, at the height of the controversy last October, a gay college student named Matthew Shepard was savagely battered in Wyoming and left to bleed to death, tied scarecrowlike to a fence along a deserted roadside. Shepard’s death shocked the country and gave rise to renewed calls for federal hate-crimes legislation. Christian-right activists, too, denounced Shepard’s murder. But because they spread the gospel of anti-homosexuality, they were criticized on the premise that their declarations can foment violent gay bashing. “Words have consequences,” says Wayne Besen, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group in Washington, D.C. “You can see it in every schoolyard in America.”

And all of a sudden, the national battle over gay rights was once again front and center. Abortion and homosexuality are the top preoccupations for much of the Christian right. Indeed, the gay-rights issue has become an important source of cash through direct-mail appeals to carefully cultivated lists of supporters. “It’s a very lucrative target for them,” says Deanna Duby, former director of education policy at People for the American Way, a civil-rights group. “It brings in a lot of money.”

Not only that, but the message to the broader audience—honed in response to advances in gay rights—has become more sophisticated and, in a perverse way, politically correct. The meaning of the Truth in Love ads is couched in terms of Christian “love” for the homosexual sinner. Another strategy has proved very successful in electoral battles in Maine, Oregon, Colorado and Ohio: Ignoring evidence of hate crimes and discrimination against gays, the Christian right portrays efforts to secure equal rights for gays as a bid for “special rights” that give them privileges other Americans don’t have. “We haven’t found an effective way of countering that,” says Rebecca Isaacs, political director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

If the army of Christian soldiers in the homosexuality wars has a general, it is FRC’s Robert Knight. In 1986, as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, Knight concluded a long, gradual process of thought and meditation; at that point, he says, “I gave my life to Jesus Christ.” Though he spent three more years at the Times, Knight was a changed man, having decided to commit himself to Christianity. After stints at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the Heritage Foundation, Washington’s premier conservative think tank, he moved to the FRC.

“Just look at the human body!” says Knight. “You can’t fool nature. The rectum was not made for sexual activity.” Then, impishly, he adds, “It is an exit ramp, not an entry ramp.

Boyish and almost baby-faced, Knight, 47, is urgently sincere. “I’ve let Jesus Christ come into my life,” he says. “When you meet God face to face, you understand how far short you have fallen of God’s standards.” He hands me a pamphlet, “The Bible and Homosexuality,” which cites the passages from Genesis, Leviticus, Judges, Samuel I and 2, Romans, Timothy I and Corinthians I in which conservative Christians believe homosexuality is condemned. By far the most famous is the story of Lot in Sodom (Genesis 19:1-29), where an unruly crowd of men demand that Lot hand over some men, or angels, “so that we may know them” (in FRC’s translation: “so that we can have sex with them”). At that point, God destroyed Sodom. Those passages and numerous others are nothing less than God’s law for many Christians, though many other theologians dispute the exact meaning and relevance of each and every passage.

Knight’s blue eyes are unblinking as he warns that America’s “man-based culture” could shudder and fall with the advent of a sexual revolution brought about by gays. “As man is reduced in stature, all hell will break loose,” he says. “We’ll see a breakdown in social organization, with more drug use, more disease, more unwanted pregnancies. You’re mainstreaming dysfunction”

As the war room for the Christian right’s anti-gay campaign, the Family Research Council is a formidable force. Housed in a luxurious modern building in downtown Washington, D.C., FRC (slogan: “Family, Faith and Freedom”) is a $14 million-a-year operation that lobbies Congress and state legislatures, and churns out a steady stream of books, pamphlets and monographs on homosexuality, pornography, school prayer and abortion. FRC’s monthly Washington Watch reaches more than 400,000 homes, and its radio broadcasts are heard daily on 400 stations across the country.

Previously, FRC was part of Focus on the Family, James Dobson’s sprawling empire based in Colorado Springs, nestled against the Rockies. Dobson, a child psychologist and the author of “Dare to Discipline”, a book advocating corporal punishment for children, founded Focus on the Family in 1977, working out of a tiny office in Arcadia, California. Since moving to Colorado, Focus has grown astonishingly, into a $109 million-a-year ministry employing 1,300 people, who produce a dozen different radio and television broadcasts, fourteen publications (including its flagship monthly magazine, Focus on the Family, with a circulation of 2.5 million), and a wide range of films and videos. Though virtually unknown to the general population, Dobson is wildly popular among his millions of followers, who listen daily to the Focus on the Family broadcasts on more than 1,900 radio outlets.

In 1992, as the FRC shifted its emphasis to lobbying Congress, Focus spun off FRC as a free-standing operation, though they have retained close ties.

Like many of his allies, Bob Knight believes that gays die younger, take more drugs, take more risks and engage in a wide range of anti-social conduct. Treading on highly controversial ground, Knight warns that the “gay agenda” targets children. “They’re luring kids into homosexual behavior,” says Knight. In a 1993 speech, he said, “There is a strong undercurrent of pedophilia in the homosexual subculture.”

If Knight is the movement’s general, his lieutenant is Pete LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality. Energetic and fast-talking, LaBarbera, 36, was a liberal and an activi5t with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now in the early 1980s. Spurred by anti-communism and support of President Reagan’s 1983 invasion of Grenada, LaBarbera gravitated toward the right while a student at the University of Michigan. His personal “Damascus road” moment came thirteen years ago, when he met a woman—”a missionary,” he says—who helped him develop a “personal relationship with God.” With his intensified religious fervor came a growing revulsion toward homosexuality.

Since 1993, LaBarbera has put out The Lambda Report, which is devoted exclusively to news about the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender world as seen through Christian-activist eyes. Though its circulation is just 3,000, the publication is notorious for its exposé’s of what LaBarbera sees as the unseemly and often lurid activities associated with the “gay lifestyle.” He regularly goes undercover to gay-rights meetings, gay bars and other locales, then recounts in near pornographic detail episodes of fellatio, masturbation and sadomasochistic sex that he claims to observe. (WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS reads the subhead for one recent Lambda Report “exclusive” on a Washington, D.C., “dungeon dance.”) The Christian right succeeds by tapping into Americans’ deep ambivalence toward homosexuality. Polls show a kind of schizophrenia: People seem to strongly favor anti-discrimination measures and other civil-rights protections for gays and lesbians, while at the same time they view homosexuality negatively—a sort of distasteful tolerance. A national survey conducted last August and published in the Washington Post found that fifty-seven percent of Americans questioned consider homosexuality unacceptable; when asked about gay sex, seventy-two percent called it unacceptable. Yet an overwhelming eighty- seven percent believe that homosexuals should have equal rights in terms of job opportunities.

Americans’ growing tolerance frustrates the Christian right, but its leaders counterbalance this trend with considerable political clout. In Congress, a substantial bloc of senators and congressmen owe their allegiance—if not their elections—to the Christian Coalition and its allies: They have a powerful grassroots apparatus along with a widespread network of radio and television outlets that millions of Christians turn to for alternative sources of news and opinion.

Indeed, the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 was credited to the power of the Christian right, and many of the freshmen elected to Congress that year reinforced a loosely organized “God squad” on issues like homosexuality, abortion and school prayer. One member of that class, former Rep. Randy Tate, R-Wash., lost his bid for reelection in 1996 and now heads the Christian Coalition.

Especially for Bible Belt Republicans in Congress, the Christian right has make-or-break power. In Republican primaries where turnout is relatively low, groups like the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family can mobilize militant, committed voters at the polls. This edge in the primaries gives the groups access to the highest levels of the Republican Party in Washington, including Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott; last year, Lott won their praise when he compared homosexuality to disorders like alcoholism and kleptomania. Many other highly visible politicians, including Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla.; Sen. James Inkofe, R-Okla.; Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C.; Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C.; and Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., have publicly disparaged gays.

Still, many on the Christian right are angry that the GOP doesn’t pay more attention to their issues. Last year, Dobson threatened a complete break with the GOP when he believed that the Christian right was getting short shrift from the national Republican leadership. He and other like-minded activists met in May with Republican House leaders, who promised to attend to the social conservative agenda. In July, House Republicans introduced a proposal to deny federal housing money to communities that provide benefits for unmarried domestic partners; another proposal seeks to block President Clinton’s efforts to prevent job discrimination against gay and lesbian federal employees. I’m living proof that the truth can set you free: The headline of the full-page ad appears below a photograph of an attractive, dark-haired woman, smiling and with her left hand held up to prominently display a wedding band. The caption reads: ‘Anne Paulk—wife, mother, former lesbian.” Also pictured are members of Exodus international, a worldwide network of Christian ministries devoted to helping gays and lesbians “confront the truth of their sexual sin.”

The Truth in Love advertising campaign originated at the ten-acre Fort Lauderdale campus of Coral Ridge Ministries, whose awe-inspiring 300-foot spire looms over Federal Highway. Coral Ridge is the home of the dynamic Rev. D. James Kennedy, who has been preaching in Florida since the 1950s. While Kennedy’s congregation of more than 9,000 members often swells with worshipers from around the country, it is through The Coral Ridge Hour that Kennedy reaches an estimated 3.5 million people weekly on 1,200 radio and television stations and two cable networks. Kennedy, who is dignified, articulate and fatherly, openly advocates that America should be transformed into a “Christian republic.”

Janet Folger, a former anti-abortion activist from Ohio, is director of the Center for Reclaiming America, the ministry’s political arm. Like many of her fellow Christian activists, Folger projects an aggrieved, set-upon mentality, arguing that Bible-believing Christians are the true victims of discrimination, not gays. The FRC’s The Other Side of Tolerance: Victims of Homosexual Activism says that “many men and women of faith... have lost their jobs or been disciplined for standing against the homosexual agenda.” It is a constant refrain. “We have been picketed,” says Folger. “They say our whole side is extreme, that we are religious political extremists.”

That feeling contributed to how upset and angry Folger became over denunciations of Trent Lott for his comparison of gays to alcoholics. She proposed to members of the National Pro-Family Forum that they conduct an outreach campaign through advertising. “We wanted to express a message of hope,” says Folger. “We wanted to tell homosexuals that you can change.”

Folger’s proposal, which was enthusiastically accepted by Coral Ridge and eventually sponsored by more than a dozen groups, was not Coral Ridge’s first foray into the anti-gay movement. The ministry pours money into antigay-rights ballot measures and the National Legal Foundation.

Coral Ridge’s media sophistication allowed it to easily assemble the ad campaign. Soon afterward, Anne Paulk found herself staring from newspaper pages across the country. Paulk and her formerly gay husband, John Paulk, have become spokespeople for the “ex-gay” movement. She says that by surrendering to God she managed to abandon her lesbian life for heterosexuality: “I was able to finally give all my relationships to God and begin the real road to healing.” John Paulk, who had been a drag queen and gay prostitute, now chairs Exodus International. Founded in Anaheim, California, in 1976, Exodus today includes ninety-seven affiliated ministries. It receives 400 to 6oo inquiries a month from homosexuals and their families, says Bob Davies, the group’s North American director. A large stable of therapists and counselors, many of them affiliated with the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuals, often works with Exodus clients to help them shed their gay identity.

The ads generated considerable backlash. To most medical experts, including the American Psychiatric Association, therapists engaging in so-called “reparative therapy” aimed at changing the sexual orientation of gay patients borders on malpractice. On December i4th, the APA warned, “The potential risks of ‘reparative therapy’ are great, including depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior.... The American Psychiatric Association opposes any psychiatric treatment, such as ‘reparative’ or ‘conversion’ therapy, which is based on the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or... that the patient should change his/her sexual orientation.” Indeed, since the early 1970s, virtually the entire medical profession has undergone a sea change in favor of accepting homosexuality.

But that has hardly deterred the antigay movement, which claims that the APA, along with the American Psychological Association and other societies, has surrendered to pressure and intimidation tactics by gay-rights activists. A television ad campaign promoting the ex-gay philosophy is in the works. While the conservative Christians who champion reparative therapy say they are motivated by sympathy for troubled gays, that is not true of everyone in the crusade against homosexuality. Extremists advocate the death penalty for gays, based on a radical interpretation of the Bible. The most notorious anti-gay activist is the Rev. Fred Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, whose Web-site address is godhatesfags.com. To a man, the mainstream Christian-right groups have denounced Phelps, and he in turn has denounced the religious right as “lukewarm cowards.” Phelps’ followers actually picket funerals of gay people. “We display large, colorful signs containing Bible words and sentiments,” says Phelps, including “GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR AIDS, FAGS BURN IN HELL, etc.” He cites “statistics” such as, “The average fag fellates 106 men, swallows fifty seminal discharges, has seventy-two penile penetrations of the anus and ingests feces of twenty-three different men every year.

One thing that Phelps has in common with the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition and ex-gay ministries like Exodus is that they all refer to the work of Dr. Paul Cameron, founder of the Family Research Institute and ISIS, the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality.

Cameron, 59, a former psychologist based in Colorado Springs, issues a stream of data often used by anti-gay activists: that gays are far more likely than straights to molest children, that gays are more likely to commit crimes as mundane as tax evasion or shoplifting, and soon. “We’re kind of the wellspring of most of the statistics about the gay lifestyle,” Cameron says.

Cameron—who in the 1980s called for quarantining gays to prevent the spread of AIDS—has been attacked not only by gay-rights groups but also by psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists, who have engaged in a decades long war with Cameron.

Like many of his allies, Cameron believes that, if left unchecked, homosexuality will destroy America like God did Sodom. “Untrammeled homosexuality can take over and destroy a social system,” says Cameron. “If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one’s own personal amusement, and all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get—and that is what homosexuality seems to be—then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist. The evidence is that men do a better job on men, and women on women, if all you are looking for is orgasm.” So powerful is the allure of gay sex, Cameron believes, that if society approves of gay people, more and more heterosexuals will be inexorably drawn into homosexuality. “I’m convinced that lesbians are particularly good seducers,” says Cameron.

“People in homosexuality are incredibly evangelical,” he adds, sounding evangelical himself. “It’s pure sexuality. It’s almost like pure heroin. It’s such a rush. They are committed in almost a religious way. And they’ll take enormous risks, do anything.” He says that for married men and women, gay sex would be irresistible. “Marital sex tends toward the boring end,” he points out. “Generally, it doesn’t deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does.” So, Cameron believes, within a few generations homosexuality would become the dominant form of sexual behavior.

Whether or not one agrees with Cameron’s views, his research has been used effectively by the Christian right during the 1990S in the campaign to overturn advances by gays and lesbians, and, it can be argued, to darken the prospects for peaceful acceptance of homosexuality. Gay-rights activist David Garrity says that the referendum in Maine has intensified anti-homosexual feeling there. “We all noticed a huge increase in harassment—a great number of shouts from teenagers in cars while we were walking on the street,” he says. “I can think of five incidents like that myself”

Tracking violent incidents, either statewide or nationally, is difficult. But according to the FBI’s latest data, in 1997 there were 1,102 reported hate crimes linked to sexual orientation, mostly aimed at gay males. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs gives a figure of 2,445. The coalition also tracked sharp increases in anti-gay violence during ballot-initiative debates in Colorado and Oregon.Following the Maine vote, the Christian Coalition announced its intention to launch a campaign called Families 2000, seeking “repeal of legislation giving special rights based on sexual behavior” in other states and “defeat of state gay adoption laws.” As a result of the Maine initiative, the coalition noted, “We added 100,000 new names to our organization in Maine.” With its complementary strategies of portraying sexual orientation as a simple choice and arguing that gays want special rights, the anti-gay movement is only growing stronger.

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Rolling Stone, No. 808, March 18, 1999, pp. 38-41.

Matthew’s Passion - Tony Kushner

1998-11-09T12:00:00.001+01:00

When Trent Lott heard the news about the murder of Matthew Shepard, the first thoughts that flashed through his mind were all about spin. Trent Lott worried about how to keep his promise to the religious right, to speak out against the homosexual agenda, without seeming to endorse murder. Trent Lott endorses murder, of course; his party endorses murder, his party endorses discrimination against homosexuals and in doing so it endorses the ritual slaughter of homosexuals.

Democracy is a bloody business, demanding blood sacrifice. Every advance American democracy has made toward fulfilling the social contract, toward justice and equality and true liberty, every step forward has required offerings of pain and death. The American people demand this, we need to see the burnt bodies of the four little black girls, or their sad small coffins; we need to see the battered, disfigured face of the beaten housewife; we need to see the gay man literally crucified on a fence. We see the carnage and think, Oh, I guess things are still tough out there, for those people. We daydream a little: What does that feel like, to burn? To have your face smashed by your husband's fist? To be raped? To be dragged behind a truck till your body falls to pieces? To freeze, tied to a fence on the Wyoming prairie, for eighteen hours, with the back of your head staved in? Americans perfected the horror film, let's not kid ourselves: These acts of butchery titillate, we glean the news to savor the unsavory details.

And then, after we've drawn a few skin-prickling breaths of the aromas of torture and agony and madness, we shift a little in our comfortable chairs, a little embarrassed to have caught ourselves in the act of prurient sadism, a little worried that God has seen us also, a little worried that we have lazily misplaced our humanity, a little sad for the victims: Oh, gee, I guess I sort of think that shouldn't happen out there to those people, and something should be done. As long as I don't have to do it.

And having thought as much, having, in fact, been edified, changed a very little bit by the suffering we have seen, our humanity as well as our skin having been pricked, we turn our back on Matthew Shepard's crucifixion and return to our legitimate entertainments. When next the enfranchisement of homosexuals is discussed, Matthew Shepard's name will probably be invoked, and the murder of gay people will be deplored by decent people, straight and gay; and when the religious right shrills viciously about how the murder doesn't matter, as it has been doing since his death, decent people everywhere will find the religious right lacking human kindness, will find these Gary Bauers and Paul Weyrichs and Pat Robertsons un-Christian, repulsive, in fact. And a very minute increment toward decency will have been secured. But poor Matthew Shepard. Jesus, what a price!

Trent Lott endorses murder. He knows that discrimination kills. Pope John Paul II endorses murder. He, too, knows the price of discrimination, having declared anti-Semitism a sin, having just canonized a Jewish-born nun who died in Auschwitz. He knows that discrimination kills. But when the Pope heard the news about Matthew Shepard, he too worried about spin. And so, on the subject of gay-bashing, the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops and priests maintain their cynical political silence. Rigorously denouncing the abuse and murder of homosexuals would be a big sin against spin; denouncing the murder of homosexuals in such a way that it received even one-thousandth of the coverage his and his church's attacks on homosexuals routinely receive, this would be an act of decency the Pope can't afford, for the Pope knows: Behind this one murdered kid stand legions of kids whose lives are scarred by the bigotry this Pope defends as sanctioned by God. None of these kids will ever be allowed to marry the person she or he loves, not while the Pope and his church can prevent it; all of these kids are told, by the Holy Catholic Church, and by the Episcopalians and Lutherans and Baptists and Orthodox Jews: Your love is cursed by God. To speak out against murdering those who are discriminated against is to speak out against discrimination. To remain silent is to endorse murder.

A lot of people worry these days about the death of civil discourse. The Pope, in his new encyclical, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), laments the death of civil discourse and cites "ancient philosophers who proposed friendship as one of the most appropriate contexts for sound philosophical inquiry." It's more than faintly ludicrous, this plea for friendship coming from the selfsame Pope who has tried so relentlessly to stamp out dissent in churches and Catholic universities, but let's follow the lead of the crazies who killed Matthew Shepard and take the Pope at his word.

Friendship is the proper context for discussion. Fine and good. Take the gun away from the head, Your Holiness, and we can discuss the merits of homosexual sex, of homosexual marriage, of homosexual love, of monogamy versus promiscuity, of lesbian or gay couples raising kids, of condom distribution in the schools, of confidential counseling for teenagers, of sex education that addresses more than abstinence. We can discuss abortion, we can discuss anything you like. Just promise me two things, friend: First, you won't beat my brains out with a pistol butt and leave me to die by the side of the road. Second, if someone else, someone a little less sane than you, feeling entitled to commit these terrible things against me because they understood you a little too literally, or were more willing than you to take your distaste for me and what I do to its most full-blooded conclusion, if someone else does violence against me, friend, won't you please make it your business to make a big public fuss about how badly I was treated? Won't you please make a point, friend, you who call yourself, and who are called, by millions of people, the Vicar on Earth of the very gentle Jesus, won't you please in the name of friendship announce that no one who deliberately inflicts suffering, whether by violence or by prejudice, on another human being, can be said to be acting in God's name? And announce it so that it is very clear that you include homosexuals when you refer to "human beings," and announce it so that the world hears you, really hears you, so that your announcement makes the news, as you are capable of doing when it suits your purposes? Won't you make this your purpose too? And if you won't, if you won't take responsibility for the consequences of your militant promotion of discrimination, won't you excuse me if I think you are not a friend at all but rather a homicidal liar whose claim to spiritual and moral leadership is fatally compromised, is worth nothing more than...well, worth nothing more than the disgusting, opportunistic leadership of Trent Lott.

A lot of people worry these days about the death of civil discourse, and would say that I ought not call the Pope a homicidal liar, nor (to be ecumenical about it) the orthodox rabbinate homicidal liars, nor Trent Lott a disgusting opportunistic hatemonger. But I worry a lot less about the death of civil discourse than I worry about being killed if, visiting the wrong town with my boyfriend, we forget ourselves so much as to betray, at the wrong moment in front of the wrong people, that we love one another. I worry much more about the recent death of the Maine antidiscrimination bill, and about the death of the New York hate crimes bill, which will not pass because it includes sexual orientation. I worry more about the death of civil rights than civil discourse. I worry much more about the irreversible soul-deaths of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered children growing up deliberately, malevolently isolated by the likes of Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich than I worry about the death of civil discourse. I mourn Matthew Shepard's actual death, caused by the unimpeachably civil "we hate the sin, not the sinner" hypocrisy of the religious right, endorsed by the political right, much more than I mourn the lost chance to be civil with someone who does not consider me fully a citizen, nor fully human. I mourn that cruel death more than the chance to be civil with those who sit idly by while theocrats, bullies, panderers and hatemongers, and their crazed murderous children, destroy democracy and our civic life. Civic, not civil, discourse is what matters, and civic discourse mandates the assigning of blame.

If you are lesbian, gay, transgendered, bi, reading this, here's one good place to assign blame: The Human Rights Campaign's appalling, post-Shepard endorsement of Al D'Amato dedicates our resources to the perpetuation of a Republican majority in Congress. The HRC, ostensibly our voice in Washington, is in cahoots with fag-bashers and worse. If you are a heterosexual person, and you are reading this: Yeah yeah yeah, you've heard it all before, but if you have not called your Congressperson to demand passage of a hate crimes bill that includes sexual orientation, and e-mailed every Congressperson, if you have not gotten up out of your comfortable chair to campaign for homosexual and all civil rights--campaign, not just passively support--may you think about this crucified man, and may you mourn, and may you burn with a moral citizen's shame. As one civilized person to another: Matthew Shepard shouldn't have died. We should all burn with shame.

The Nation November 9, 1998

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Tony Kushner is a playwright.

Cunanan the Barbarian & A Timely Death - Daniel Reitz

1997-07-28T12:00:00.004+02:00

Daniel Reitz is a genius. For months after the Andrew Cunanan murders, I bitched that the one aspect of the story that NOBODY was talking about was the shallowness of the rich A-list fags who built the man up, went to his parties, took his money, fucked him, and never concerned their gym-bunny selves with the fact that he was sick, false, empty, and narcissistic at the core. Well, I was wrong. Someone did talk about it—Daniel Reitz in these two essays, “Cunanan the Barbarian“ and “A Timely Death.”

Finally, a serial killer we can really hate.

Recently a fellow fag, some flunky script reader for some indie film company, held his nose over a film script of mine, in which a queer man takes revenge on a Jersey hood who bashed him and his lover, sniffing that “gay men ... don’t stray into hate-crime violence.”

As I write this, a week has passed since Gianni Versace, world-renowned fashion designer and homosexual, was shot twice in the head by another homosexual, psycho spree killer Andrew Phillip Cunanan. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that this particular example of serial killing might qualify as a hate crime, if not in the usual political sense. Andrew Cunanan is pissed about something, and I don’t think it was haute couture that prompted him to shoot, bludgeon, stab and slash his way across the country.

My guess is that he’s tortured by the revelation of his HIV-positive status, and the bloody trail he’s been leaving since April is his way of mourning his lost fly-girl lifestyle by making other fags pay, as well as the occasional heterosexual who just happens to be in possession of the perfect getaway vehicle.

Thinking about the pass-the-smelling-salts delicacy of the above-mentioned script reader, I reflect on a glorious tradition of gay men treating other gay men to their own special brand of endearment: For example, the legacy of club queen Michael Alig—who shot his gay roommate due to a dispute over rent and then threw him into the river—will live on in homo hearts forever. I’m also reminded of something Spike Lee once said: Black people are incapable of racism. Seemingly, this kind of idiot’s logic has worked its way into the PC conscience of certain homosexuals who simply can’t believe that all us “gays” aren’t living in a fairy paradise of Shabby Chic sofas, post-workout iced mocha lattes, George Clooney look-alike lovers and a closet full of Gianni Versace.

Of course, there is far more anonymous, if less sensational, violence played out on a daily basis behind more gay and lesbian doors than we care to think about. I’ve witnessed a fair share of it myself; I’ve even doled it out. I’m aware that, to many gay folks, image equals credibility. After the Versace killing, a cultured homosexual gentleman of my acquaintance groaned, “Why does he (Cunanan) have to be gay?” The fact that most of the victims were gay didn’t seem to enter into it. After all, what is the sound of a queer tree falling in a hetero forest?

Why is this? Partly because we seem to have embraced that utopian myth that gay people don’t—can’t—actually hurt each other, unless of course it’s consensual. Sure, we argue, we get drunk, we get flirty with strangers at a bar, a little carried away with our fave drugs or debt. But such peccadilloes never make us violent. How could they? We are, as the word implies, gay.

We might be better off if we tossed out the batter-bowl of mushy, fluffernutter queer correctness that still dictates how we’re supposed to come across to the world. Rather than thinking about what a Cunanan does to our collective image, we would do well to face the fact that we’re as capable of the same destructive behavior as everybody else. I used to think during the glory days of ACT-UP and Queer Nation that we queers were all in it together. I realize now how ridiculously naive a notion that was. I have seen more instances of bad behavior perpetrated by one gay person against another than I have space to describe; usually, it’s in a “harmless” social context—rampant selfishness, egotism, dishonesty, power plays, head games. But sometimes it isn’t so “harmless.” And there’s no gay bashing, emotional or physical, like one from a “brother.”

At this point, I’d like to vent on the weasel Andrew Phillip Cunanan. Obviously you can’t apply Emily Post’s rules of etiquette to psychopaths, but Cunanan is the most obnoxious kind of spree killer to have driven down the Florida freeway: prissy, pouty and preppy. With all due respect to the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims, I had more sympathy for Dahmer’s sickness than for Cunanan’s. At least Dahmer, when he spoke of being relieved that he was finally behind bars and away from a world vulnerable to a psychosis he couldn’t control, showed that some embers of humanity still glowed within him. All evidence seems to indicate that Cunanan wants to be caught, too. But as I look at his smarmy, smirking smile flashed on TV and read the newspaper accounts, all I see is a squinty-eyed, ostrich-eating, champagne-swilling, social-climbing whore who barely worked a day in his life, who flirted and fucked his way to nowhere but the next gay pit stop, who just couldn’t get over the fact that he wasn’t born a Kennedy, that his father didn’t own a sugar plantation in the Philippines but was just a sad, allegedly crooked loser who deserted the family, and who’s furious at the world for being HIV-positive.

Then there was the other image splashed across my TV screen—the ambitious, excessive, hedonistic, sexy, celebrated Gianni Versace being rushed down a sun-drenched Miami street on a stretcher, his handsome white head thick and dripping with blood. And for a moment it was easy to forget (especially for the FBI) about Cunanan’s other victims, who were not necessarily friends of Madonna and Naomi and Courtney, the lesser-known ones like Jeffrey Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin, William Reese. Or maybe it’s all just a bad dream. After all, we’re not violent. As the script reader insisted, we’re lovers, not killers.

—July 22, 1997
(http://www.salonmagazine.com/july97/news/news970722.html)

________________________________________

A Timely Death

Now that Andrew Cunanan is out of the way, gays can go back to their old narcissistic, self-absorbed ways, all in the name of “pride.”

Andrew Cunanan died just in time. Old friends in his former stomping ground of San Diego were able to proceed with their annual gay pride festivities this weekend without a hitch—no pesky sniper fire, no ominous sightings of the smirking spree-killer, no murderous “visits” to old acquaintances. Breathing a collective sigh of relief, the denizens of the Hillcrest neighborhood indulged in such pride-inspiring activities as “The Harbor Cruz,” “Circuit Daze” and “The Zoo Party” without once looking over their bare shoulders. And of course, where would gay pride be without the Parade? The theme of this year’s was “Share the Vision.” That just about covered everything in one big soufflé of solidarity.

But can the San Diego festivities overcome the legacy of the area’s most notorious homosexual so soon after his demise? Cunanan was ultimately responsible for his own pathology. He was an über-queer, the quintessence of sadism and bad form. But if you magnified him a thousand times you might find him emblematic of any number of witless queers I have known: clinically narcissistic, intent in the pursuit of hedonism, zealous in avoidance of consequences and unfeeling in the extreme.

Still, as in San Diego, and in New York and San Francisco last month, the beat goes on, the parade floats go up and the boys come out flaunting a “pride” too often based on the false sense of self gay people acquire when they allow their entire identities as human beings to be submerged in their sexuality—I fuck, therefore I am.

Take, for instance, the Chelsea Clones—a bunch of brainless gym bunnies residing in an area of Manhattan north of the West Village and south of midtown. To the Clones—identical slabs of femmy beefcake who lounge around the Big Cup Caf fresh from a workout and steam-room wank session—being out and proud means being one in a crowd. Their contempt for the aging invert is as thick as their health shakes; they dismiss with a smirky, self-satisfied turn of the head any and all lesser physical specimens. The only reading they do is the free queer classifieds, which they don’t really read at all but use as a prop to cruise some pansy pod person over their grande Mocha lattes. These are the same queers who, at every gay pride parade, nude from the waist up, waist down in skin-tight Ray Dragon bike shorts, embrace each other and get all misty-eyed during the moment of silence for all the brothers dead from the big A. As if that makes up for the other 364 days of mind-numbing self-absorption.

Pride begins and ends with self-realization and acceptance. I think of myself at 11, facing with dread the awareness that I was what no one but evil perverts choose to be, and yet I didn’t choose; I was guilty of a “crime” I didn’t commit, and the punishment, I thought, was a life sentence of silent suffering and self-loathing, with no parole. It took me years to realize I had an innate sense of my ability to survive, and I came to draw on reserves of strength that most heterosexuals don’t have a clue about; and that’s something you can’t parade down the avenue once a year.

But I also part company with those who believe that merely existing as a gay man or woman is, in and of itself, something to be proud of, any more than being born black or a woman. Being born wasn’t your doing. Neither was being gay. So why should you be “proud” of something you didn’t even do?

In last month’s New York Pride Parade, the hottest float (partly because of the go-go boys dancing on it) was an advertisement urging uninfected gays to keep themselves HIV negative. You wouldn’t think that such a message needs to be advertised 16 years after the epidemic made itself known, but there it was, replete with hip-hop attitude and club music accompaniment: It’s cool to be sane! Living is sexy! That’s not pride, it’s self-preservation, and in 1997 gay men shouldn’t need to be reminded that you need to “play safe.” The message really means that in 1997, we’re guilty of the same behavior we exhibited in 1977—self-gratification at any price—and that is not something to be proud of.

In the context of our continued self-annihilation, Andrew Philip Cunanan was a speck. We have to realize that we are all potential killers. It’s not enough to shake our asses on a parade float. It’s not enough to echo mawkish platitudes about murderous old acquaintances—“That’s not the Andrew I knew,” some left-behind friend in California declared in all his pious banality. And it’s certainly not enough to think we’re making progress when we still have to convince ourselves of the merits of not fucking each other to death.

—July 28, 1997
(http://www.salonmagazine.com/july97/news/news970728.html)

________________________________________

Daniel Reitz is a playwright and screenwriter living in New York, currently turning his play Urban Folktales into a screenplay.

Three Screeds From Key West - Tony Kushner

1997-04-02T12:00:00.002+02:00

For Larry Kramer

These are prefatory remarks written for the three panels upon which I sat at the recent Key West Seminar on “Literature in the Age of AIDS.” I wrote each one about an hour before the panel; Larry Kramer called them “screeds” and that sounded right so I’ve used his title. The titles of each section are simply the titles somebody else assigned to the panels. I think everything I write sounds like a dramatic monologue, which isn’t surprising; these monologues were written by and for the almost-entirely fictional character Tony Kushner, a playwright, who, as he said in the last of the three panels, spent the weekend feeling like the bastard child of Neville Chamberlain and Attila the Hun. There’s a reference in the second screed to a struggle Sarah Schulman and I had over several instances of thoughtless exercising of privilege and exclusion. Better, I said, borrowing a lesson I’ve learned from my collaborator friend Kimberly Flynn, to be awkward in admitting a mistake than to be a totally irresponsible fuck-up: and this I think is in a sense the point of all that follows.

I. The Theater and AIDS

I can’t imagine I’m the only one here—I certainly hope I’m not—who feels odd that she or he has benefited, even profited from the epidemic. This is an ugly statement and I hesitate to write it or utter it, but I’ve been haunted all weekend, and was anticipatorily haunted before coming here, and even considered not coming, up till the last moment, because of strong feelings of unworthiness, inadequacy, and fraudulence. I’ve acquired a habit now of confessing to these feelings before crowds of people, and I probably should have stayed at home and sought out the appropriate 12-Step program, Playwrights’ Anonymous, instead of mortifying myself before artists and activists I admire so much—whose presence, I suspect, made the promise of suffering a really intense abjection entirely too tempting to pass up.

I didn’t set out to write a play about AIDS, I set out to write a play about what it was like to be a gay, Jewish, Leftist man in New York City in mid-80’s Reagan America. I really think I set out to write about Reagan. I’d seen a few plays and TV films “about” AIDS, and with one single exception they were all terrible, in my opinion, disease-of-the-week weepies addressing something manifestly monumentally of another order—an order, I felt, like the Holocaust, the scale of which was incommensurable with representation on the tacky-tawdry-showbizzy stage. The one (and without attacking other playwrights and screenwriters I’d like to stress this one) towering exception was The Normal Heart, of course, which galvanized its audiences like no play any of us—any of my generation of theater artists, certainly—had ever seen; and which—and I’m certain this was the least of its author’s intentions, if it indeed it figured at all—awoke in theater people a long-dormant ambition to make popular theater that enters full-bloodedly into civic life, into immediacy, crisis, and public debate.

The Normal Heart, scene for scene, is a great American play. People have an annoying tendency to call it a polemic, but “1,112 And Counting” is a polemic—a historically significant polemic, that rare thing, a sermon that works; The Normal Heart is a great play. It has depth, complexity, symbolic and political and psychological and musical strata, strains which proceed, unerringly orchestrated with the gripping, terrifying narrative until all the pennies drop at just the right moment to move a large, impatient, distracted house full of people to terror, pity, empathy, reflection and outrage.

But the play set an impossibly high standard and we suspected, and we were not wrong in this, that its urgency and phosphorous brilliance were not exclusively the effects of its author’s talents and technical skills, but also of his activist engagement with AIDS. As we have demonstrated with AIDS and every other human and political calamity, and with our passive acquiescence to the destruction of the National Endowment for the Arts, among theater folk the activist impulse is forever devoured, or rather eviscerated, by our fatal attraction to its inherent drama. We love the flash and thunderclap and are too impatient to do the work of constructing the bomb. We could not, and I think we have not, followed Larry’s lead.

(In a way, this is just a 90’s version of what grand old theater queens used to say to excuse appalling, inexcusable sloth or misbehavior, quoting Duke Theseus, usually in a tremulous voice when accepting your award at the Sarah Siddons Society dinner: The best in these are but shadows, the worst no worse, blah blah blah.)

We all know that there’s been a lot of theater about AIDS, a lot of dramatic literature, and some of it is very good, even if it is only “dramatic literature” and hence a thing of indifference outside of annoyed envy at the size of dramatic royalty checks to many novelists and poets and scholars and book reviewers and (dare I say it? and I say it with the greatest respect) Keynote Speakers.

We all know that the form, the public forum, the instant community of actor and audience, collective attendance, catharsis, can in the right hands suit any subject of a vast shared grief and rage. We know that theater originates in the sacred, but we should also remember that the Church banished actors, once full-throttle mimesis, representation and narrative had insinuated themselves into the Mass; not because of a good actor’s power to inspire idolatry but rather because the whole business started to smell of something dangerously cheap, risible, carnal: the ecclesiastical rapidly became the dialectical opposite of its Sacred subject. The proximity of the Divine and the Preposterous, the Infinitely Grave and the Infinitely Embarrassing, made the theatrical bits more exciting than the sacramental ritual and hence the theatrical became ripe for, and deserving of, anathema.

We come to the theater—and to literary conferences, which are also affairs of voices and bodies and flashes of excitement and lingering doubts and disappointments, mean and bruising and cruisy and fun—to be mortified, and to delight in the mortification of others, to suffer with those we see (and cause to) suffer and pay money to see suffer. Theater is always self-evidently political because it is always dialectical and always dialectical because this paradox, Inspiration Flashing and Modesty Blushing, simultaneously, is at its heart, it’s what makes the engine go. All theater is a waste of time, which reminds us that our best and dearest dream for ourselves and for our fellow humans ought to be oceans of time to waste in a cozy seat in which you have (and here we see the difference between the theatrical and the literary) very little work to do to receive the best kind of pleasure: free of consequence.

I think what I’m trying to say is that it is theater’s inappropriateness that makes it a likely place for the staging of scenes from a pandemic. To borrow an image used by Herbert Blau, Shakespeare, and Beckett, where else but the theater can we go to mourn, and mourn deeply, over a corpse, noting all the while that the corpse over which we grieve, oh beautiful, impossible sight! is breathing.

I did not set out opportunistically to write about AIDS because it’s such great material; but it is, isn’t it? And so am I not opportunistic? Am I not, as I have been accused of being, an AIDS profiteer? Perhaps I haven’t heard this said because I haven’t been at the panels where it’s been said, or perhaps it’s too despicable or vulgar or in some sense unnecessary to say, or perhaps survivor guilt is a sufficient rubric, but something has compelled me to make this declaration to the conference. I know my play has helped people and helped the cause. It has also made me comfortable. And there’s something unbearable about that. Which, maybe, I ought to keep to myself, but, playwright, theater worker that I am, I am too much in love with the drama of declaration and mortification.

We’ve talked about a fear of using AIDS metaphorically, about comparing AIDS to the Holocaust, and this dilemma I think speaks to my theme: Using AIDS. Using AIDS to make art, to make a political point, to achieve a desirable goal. Of course we’re squeamish. But I have always thought that the only point in remembering and then organizing memory into an event and then naming that event “the Holocaust” or “the AIDS epidemic” is to provide ourselves and the future with a standard by which comparison can be made. Otherwise, forget, for God’s sake; do us all a favor.

But in this standard-construction business is implicit the notion that the Holocaust and the epidemic are for something, are utilitarian, can be turned into phenomena by which we might profit—morally, spiritually, and yes, materially. We must approach this dialectically, I suppose is my point: to use human suffering, whether it originates in viral infection or from malignant human agency or from a blending of the two—is necessary and appalling, neither more one than the other, always unbearable, always unavoidable, a terrible mandate, always both.

II. “Seeking the truth, a matter of life and death,” Part One

I struggle a lot with what I’ve come increasingly to describe to myself as a divide between Wisdom with a capital W, which I am reasonably certain I do not possess, and the something that I do possess—opinions? In my opinion, my opinions are the correct opinions to have, but having the correct opinions is not the same as knowing the truth, having Wisdom; some people have that, but I don’t know where they got it any more than I know, really, why I’m gay. But I’m reasonably sure I’m gay and I’m reasonably sure my opinions are at least 65% right 70% of the time, which makes me cleverer than all of the Republican Party and 90% of the Democratic Party and a whole lot of others besides, and that really is all I know of truth and how to get it.

My favorite writer Melville loved those pearl divers, he wrote in a letter to his boyfriend, Hawthorne, who go deep down seeking the truth, rising to the surface again with bloodshot eyes, their pressurized, lachrymal stigmata indicating how hard a struggle it is to seek Wisdom. Some dark nights I can guess at what Melville meant, but I’m too afraid of the bends to try it myself; and why should I, really, when Wisdom doesn’t work as well in the theater as having the correct opinions, and I can always get Wisdom seated in my armchair, reading novels?

Truth is a matter of life and death and nothing proves that more than this plague; lies, as often as silences, equal death. Wisdom will save you, reliably, that’s how you know it’s Wisdom, or at least if it can’t save you it will help you make sense of your demise. And it lasts: truth is the daughter of time. But I have been bewildered since 1981. Opinions work in the moment, if you’re voluble enough, but they can betray you. Here are some of my false truths, opinions that betrayed me: In 1981 I thought AIDS was a distraction from the real struggle, which was for a lesbian and gay rights bill in New York City. In 1983 and 1984 I refused to be tested and encouraged others not to, certain that it was a mistake, a hysterical over-reaction, cooperation with an oppressive medical/political homophobic establishment—and maybe back then it was, who knows? I have held the opinion that AIDS was legionnaire’s disease, swine flu, a monkey virus, and practically become a maintenance illness (on several occasions, which is why protease inhibitors make me feel glad but very cautious).

The illnesses, sufferings, nightmares, struggles, heroism, and deaths of friends and idols, such involvement in the movement as I can claim, reading, writing Angels—my opinions get corrected, but there’s still so much I don’t know and am afraid to know, and some of it may be life-and-death. Is it okay to suck cock without a condom? Should I or shouldn’t I say that I do, sometimes? My bemusement is a luxury, which Amiri Baraka has defined as living in ignorance, comfortably. But it’s also genuine un-knowing in the face of mysteries, and so I seek out my multicultural fallible rabbinate, for exegesis, for rescue. My chiefest wisdom, I think, is knowing myself to be unwise. I don’t mean this to sound as bromidic as it does, it’s not universally true, thank God. And it goes without saying you can probably hear it, that my greatest danger is my complacency. For agnostics, both of the secular and of the sacred order, complacency is the most venal sin. That, and having the wrong opinions. Lots of people have the wrong opinions and know them to be wrong and still act in accordance with their error, and every morning I thank God I’m not one of those.

I have a few truths, which I believe to be truths and not opinion, because I don’t understand them fully or even partially after thinking about them for a long time, and in that quality of unfathomableness these truths resemble God as I intuit God to be; if God is anything at all, one thing S/He is, is unknowable. I know three truths: Democracy, because I can’t imagine justice without it, nor can I imagine anything better; Socialism, because capitalism sucks; and Internationalism, or Solidarity if you will, because we’ll never have the first nor the second without this third. It is almost always for a lack of solidarity that democracy and socialism (or whatever you choose to call a more sane and just way of organizing human economic affairs in the global community) fail.

It is very easy to say this and it makes me feel good to say it, but solidarity is immensely difficult, especially for the privileged—my friend Kimberly Flynn gave me a quote once from Gayatri Spivak about “the slow unlearning of privilege” being the necessary work of the privileged interested in participating in justice. Slow because painful. Sarah Schulman taught me a painful lesson in that unlearning today; learning hurts; I’m going to try to learn. I don’t want my opinions to fossilize in the honey-colored amber of my ignorance, or cowardice, I don’t want to start defending ignorance, which is always indefensible.

I think the cure for AIDS is Democratic Socialist Internationalism, or Internationalist Democratic Socialism, or Socialist Internationalist Democracy—help me out here. This may be opinion rather than Wisdom; but if it’s Wisdom to despair, I’d rather be opinionated; if, as Larry Kramer seems to write in the program, it’s a choice between opinion and artistry, I’d rather be opinionated. Activism and art about AIDS have run up against the wall of Economics; so has race, gender, homosexual rights, disability rights, immigrant rights—the whole rainbow of progressive causes has hit the Milton Friedman Memorial Firewall barricade, and balkanized. All await a decent answer to the pitiless capital-logic of the Balanced Budget; we must make this barricade budge. This is why I so thoroughly despise gay conservatism. They don’t believe in regulation, they want to cut the capital gains tax, and cutting the capital gains tax is homophobic, preserving the capital gains tax a lesbian and gay rights issue. Cutting taxes is racist, sexist, homophobic: if it is any one of these it is all three. That’s my opinion.

We people have two hedgehog questions, it seems to me: How much trouble are we in? And can we do anything about it? If the answer to the first question is “a lot!” and if the answer to the second question is “no,” then it would be a kindness to die, the only decent thing, really. And if that’s Wisdom, who wants it? If the answer to the second question is “yes,” then a third question inevitably follows, my favorite: “What is to be done?”

III. “Seeking the truth, a matter of life and death,” Part Two

Theodore Adorno wrote a really great essay called “On Commitment,” which I think reaches the wrong conclusions but lays out pretty much the same dialectic we struggled with last night, and I think we’ve struggled with it through much of this conference, at least the parts I’ve attended. Adorno, as I recall [and I didn’t have the essay here in Key West to refer to, so if I misconstrue, and anyone here knows better, don’t bust me], writes of art which moves in its urgency right up to its audience, or at least towards it; and art which almost seems to retreat from its audience—”reticent” art, to borrow an apt word Robert Dawidoff used on Friday—but for all its reticence, still committed, still purposeful, art which persists in indulgence in a grand and necessary luxury, the hope and faith in human beings that whatever it was that compelled them to pick up a book, a poem, go see a play—that this same impulse will get them moving when they cease to be consumers and spectators of culture and return to the social world and its demands for action, for agency.

Of these two aesthetic stratagems, one which addresses you aggressively and one which demands of you exertion by virtue of its flight from you (we might choose to call one political and the other literary, or accessible and difficult), Adorno prefers the reticent, the literary, and the difficult, while recognizing that each contains elements of the other, and both seek different means to engage in public, political struggle. But this doesn’t mean his essay is a kind of “I’m OK you’re OK, I say potato you say rutabaga” affair. He writes: One is better than the other. He reaches a conclusion about committed art many of us have reached: that the faith in one’s audience or reader to perform empathic leaps (empathy perhaps being art’s most sublime gift and function) must be matched by the artist’s embracing a rigorous discipline of non-partisan (to the extent that it is possible) observation, self-investigation, eschewing of pretentiousness and metaphysical, rhetorical posturing—to become the constantly-retreating horizon point upon which the wayfarer, the reader, expects to find redemption, wisdom, peace, succor, epiphany—the future.

Adorno, because he thinks dialectically, and does not feel the need we Americans seem to feel to pretend that we don’t struggle, or to pretend that the struggling, the wriggling, isn’t Life, and isn’t Infinite as long as there is a species and unceasing unto our deaths and, who knows? perhaps beyond. Adorno, inarguably an elegant writer, a great stylist, is comfortable with difficulty; indeed he revels in it, even in the scars difficulty can leave. He doesn’t do something I think a lot of us do. He doesn’t announce his mastery by clobbering the dialectic, he doesn’t get sere, or vatic; he doesn’t say, “I personally know how to do this impossibly difficult thing, and so I no longer struggle.” He says, “I know what is best” but he leaves open the possibility, dangerous to him, that in 1997 a gay 40-year-old Jew facing four more years of Speaker Gingrich and Bill “Bipartisan Compromise” Clinton, young friends and family with AIDS and breast cancer because the world is poisoned and the whole endless catalogue of it, who is frightened by the whole endless catalogue of it, the greed and the bigotry and the terrible death, because last year one of his secular rabbis from whom he has come to expect hope and marching orders told him, in a confidence he now compulsively betrays by sharing it, that in one hundred years he is certain that there will be no life left on earth—Adorno’s fidelity to dialectics forces him to forsake the burnished glow of “the solution” and offer up the very tools with which this frightened queer American Jew in 1997 might conclude that Adorno is a very great thinker who finally—Brecht was right about him—finally was in some regards a compromised paid state intellectual talking out of his hat.

I guess what I’m saying is that truth is dialectical. Which does not mean that it politely nods to the opposition, which nods and winks back signaling brandy & cigars in the back room after the rubes have been fooled by witnessing a sham fight. A live model for this sort of false opposition might be the House Republicans and Democrats, and now the Ethics committee’s Primate Parody of justice in calling the tax thief Gingrich to an utterly zipless account.

Dialectics should be the opposite of polite, or reassuringly relativist. Neville Chamberlain was not a dialectician. Dialectics is messy. A dialectically shaped truth is a heated argument, and it should be three things: first, outrageously funny, because puzzles are fun and because, faced with the improbability and impossibility life’s contradictions present us with, what else is there to do but laugh; secondly, absolutely agonizing, because faced with the above, what else is there to do but feel terrible pain, fear, pity?, because a proper dialectics will make us face something most of us can’t, namely the probable truth that suffering, as E. H. Carr writes, is indigenous to history, and that’s horrible; and, thirdly, a dialectic should move us forward. Don’t, in other words, lose sight of the fact that you are probably almost as wrong as you are right but knowing, if it is given to you to know, requires the courage to combine your contemplation with your action and act—Praxis, in other words, movement; because we are, after all, bodies on this earth and it is as much a chalkboard and a laboratory as it is a temple, and always remember what Robert Duncan once said in an interview: Symmetry is what life resists arriving at; symmetry is stasis; symmetry equals death.

________________________________________

From The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Volume IV, No. 2, Spring, 1997.

Tony Kushner is the author of Angels in America, Part One (Millennium Approaches) and Part Two (Perestroika), Slavs!, and other plays, as well as numerous essays and reviews.

Safe Sex Sucks - Wendell Ricketts

1994-12-01T00:00:00.001+01:00

Versions of this article have been published as: "Safe Sex Sucks: The Oral Sex Controversy." Drummer 179, December 1994, pp. 23-25; and as: Safe Sex Sucks: Commentary, San Francisco Frontiers, April 13, 1995, pp. 12-15.

_________________

ALTHOUGH FEW AIDS EDUCATORS WILL ADMIT IT, THE SAFE-SEX information with which they have been inundating the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community over the last decade has carried with it a fatal flaw. Even as doctors, researchers, health educators, and activists have argued over what sexual practices do and don't belong on the "safe" list, that is, virtually no one has been willing to talk to sexually active men and women about how to weigh conflicting medical information; evaluate the biases of their information sources; and learn to make sane, reasonable assessments of the personally acceptable risks to which their sexual practices may expose them. Instead, we've settled for a scattershot approach and for slogans like this one: Anyone can get AIDS.

Well, yes, anyone can. But not everyone is equally likely to.

The last year has brought a deluge of new and confusing safe-sex information-this time related to a reassessment of the dangers of cocksucking. As with every debate about safe-sex rules that has come before, people who need to know how to protect themselves from AIDS are getting more of what won't help (a torrent of personal conjecture and "expert" arguments over interpretation) and less of what will (guidance in evaluating the available information and in using it to establish a personal hierarchy of risk).

Part of the problem, as always, is that scientific studies don't lead automatically to clarity about safer sex. In one widely reported piece of research, for example, (i) two men apparently seroconverted after they engaged in cocksucking in which they sometimes did and sometimes didn't take semen into their mouths. Making this study somewhat difficult to interpret, however, is the fact that both men had gingivitis. In other words, they may have taken infected semen into their mouths at a time when their gums were bleeding. Their gum condition, then, provided a more efficient "portal" for HIV and increased the risk-in their personal case-of sucking cock. Yet the study has been used to argue that oral sex presents some greater general risk than experts had previously realized.

Here's another example of the ways in which information about oral-sex risk is typically misused. Canadian M.D. Joss De Wet announced in September 1994 that he had treated seven HIV-antibody-negative patients who had seroconverted-even though their only sexual activity was cocksucking. "Oral sex," Dr. De Wet told reporters, "is not safe."

Unfortunately, there's no news here. No one ever said it was. Rather, the risk involved in cocksucking to orgasm has always been acknowledged, and no information has been discovered recently that throws doubt on our understanding of the degree of that risk.

When it comes to cocksucking without orgasm, meanwhile, two different, small-scale reports have indicated that HIV viral material (though not necessarily infectious HIV) is present in the precum of 43% (ii) to 52% (iii) of HIV-antibody-positive men. So far there has only been only study-not several as some journalists have reported-that suggests the possibility of HIV transmission following unprotected cocksucking without orgasm. In that study, Dr. Michael Samuel (HIV/AIDS Epidemiology Program Manager with the New Mexico Department of Health) looked at pooled data collected between 1984 and 1989 from three San Francisco "cohorts."(iv) Because these data were collected in the years that immediately followed the invention of safer sex, of course, Samuel's study does not-and doesn't pretend to-reflect current safer-sex practices.

Nonetheless, one widely quoted figure from the Samuel study has been an estimate that cocksucking without orgasm carries with it a one-percent risk per partner of contracting HIV. But that simply doesn't reflect Samuel's findings. In fact, Samuel reports no separate figure for cocksucking without orgasm and, in a phone interview, confirmed (a) that his study was not designed to tease out a separate risk for cocksucking with orgasm vs. cocksucking without orgasm and (b) that it provided no proof of actual transmission of HIV via precum.

Rather, the general one-percent infectivity rate for "receptive" cocksucking that Samuel reports is based on a statistical model of the prevalence of HIV infection in a given population (in this case, gay men in San Francisco). His study-and the one-percent estimate-cannot accurately account for the dozens of variables that affect whether HIV may be transmitted between two people engaged in a specific act of cocksucking. Because of the way data were collected, moreover, Samuel could report only per-partner risk estimates, although he and his co-authors acknowledge that, "for personal decision making and for modeling, the per-contact infectivity is of greater relevance than the per-partner infectivity." (v) That only makes logical sense. If you are antibody-negative and your partners are antibody-negative, for instance, the risks of being infected with HIV through unprotected cocksucking-even to the point of taking cum into your mouth-are low. The risk decreases further if you only have one partner and if he, in turn, isn't having sex with anybody besides you (or sharing IV drug needles or receiving blood transfusions).

Obviously, however, if you base your behavior on such beliefs, you make some major assumptions-including the assumption that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, that HIV-antibody tests are always reliable (they're not), and that your presumably antibody-negative partners are not simply in the midst of a "latency" period (the months after infection before antibodies to the virus show up on tests). Maybe you can live with the degree of doubt inherent in such assumptions and maybe you can't.

If you are already HIV-antibody-positive, on the other hand, you may feel that it no longer matters whether you engage in sex that potentially re-exposes you to HIV. The danger of re-exposure to a new "dose" of HIV or to different strains is also being debated by doctors and researchers. But even leaving that issue aside, exposure to common sexually transmitted bacteria and viruses other than HIV isn't good for anyone-whether or not your immune system is compromised. Nonetheless, these are the kinds of decisions that sexually active HIV-antibody-positive people have to make.

Weighing the Risks
Perhaps even more valuable than understanding the medical information, however, is recognizing the reality that we live in a world that is full of risks-even deadly ones. People who drive to work in rush-hour traffic take a significant risk of being killed in a car accident. (Motor-vehicle fatalities accounted for one in every 50 deaths in 1990.) Cigarette smokers expose themselves to a wide range of debilitating and fatal diseases. (Seven percent of all deaths annually are caused by lung cancer.) Californians live with the threat of devastating earthquakes, midwesterners risk disastrous tornadoes and floods, citizens on the Mexico/Texas border are in increasing danger of encountering swarms of "killer" bees. We weigh and assess such risks as these-and countless others-as we go about our daily lives. And we accept them.

More than that, we understand that risk can be managed, moderated, and lived with. There is logic in the assertion that even the tiny risk of being killed in a plane crash (approximately one death per 50,000 passengers) increases if you fly twice weekly rather than only once a year-although we accept the fact that every flight poses some danger.

When it comes to AIDS, however, many people in the United States (including not a few medical professionals) behave as though "zero-risk" can be achieved or should even be expected. We've all heard the news interviews with terrified parents who refuse to let some kid with AIDS into their child's grade school because "even if there's only a one-in-a-billion chance that my son could catch AIDS from him, that's too much." If such parents really believed in protecting their children from anything that posed more than a "one in a billion" risk, they'd never even let them get on the school bus in the morning.

None of this is meant to trivialize the risk of contracting HIV or to encourage anyone to take that risk lightly. But it is essential to view our AIDS risk in the context of the innumerable, non-quantifiable risks that are inherent simply in being alive-and to use that perspective to make rational, information-based decisions about our sexual behavior.

For those who insist on zero AIDS risk, of course, no margin of error is small enough. In the sexual arena, that effectively means no sex, because absolutely safe sex requires avoiding all contact between potentially infectious body fluids and mucus membranes (such as the inside of the mouth or the lining of the rectum) and even the skin. No cum on my chest; I might have scratched the head off a pimple there. No kissing, because HIV has been detected in saliva. (HIV has also been found in breast milk, tears, urine, and vaginal fluid.)

It may also mean giving up our faith in the "safety" of condoms. Although we've put a lot of eggs into that particular basket, research confirms that condom effectiveness varies significantly from brand to brand. One study, in fact, reported that several popular condom brands, when subjected to simulated intercourse in the laboratory, leaked between 0.9% and 22.8% of the time.(vi) Condoms, in other words, pose a risk of HIV transmission even when they are used correctly. Yet AIDS educators continue to behave as though condoms were the Great White Hope of the safe-sex movement.

For those who realize that zero-risk sex (and zero-risk living) don't exist, there's only one completely accurate-if not completely reassuring-answer to the question Is it dangerous to suck cock? And that is: It depends. It depends upon whether the person whose cock you are sucking is HIV-antibody-positive or not. It depends upon how much your gums bleed when you brush your teeth. It depends upon what you make of the limited research that shows the presence of HIV viral material in precum. It depends upon whether your partner even produces precum. (Alfred Kinsey reported that one-third of the men in his research produced no precum at all, regardless of their age or level of arousal.) It depends upon whether you get cum in your mouth or not. And on and on.

Further, despite what you may have read in your local paper, legitimate scientific debates are still taking place over such matters as when and under what conditions semen or precum even contain infectious HIV; whether saliva kills or inhibits HIV; whether the likelihood of transmission of HIV through mouth-penis contact depends upon the virulence of the strain of HIV, upon the amount of HIV transmitted, upon possible changes in an antibody-positive partner's infectivity at different times, upon the number of contacts, upon the condition of the mucus membrane lining the urethra, or upon some combination of all these; and about the way in which transmission is affected by such common dental problems as gingivitis or by the presence of sores or cuts (either visible wounds or microabrasions) in the mouth of the person who sucks cock. How much risk does each of these factors add? That sort of information is simply never going to be quantifiable.

Safe But Sorry?
At a symposium on AIDS in the Media held at the Wexner Center at Columbus, Ohio in 1993, one panel member put safer-sex concerns into this context: "Avoiding HIV is not a sufficient purpose for my life," he said.

Although we have some information about the changes people have made in their sexual practices in light of AIDS, we know almost nothing about how individuals come to those decisions. It's conceivable, for example, that some men have elected to stop getting butt-fucked, but have decided that their sex lives would suffer too greatly if they also had to give up cocksucking. So the pact they make with themselves is: "I'll suck cock if I want to, but I won't get cum in my mouth. And no more cocks up my ass."

Indeed, there's evidence that men are weighing their safer-sex options in precisely this way. In his phone interview, for example, Dr. Samuel noted that men were more likely to allow a partner to come in their mouths if that partner was HIV-antibody negative. These men, in other words, understood the danger of ingesting HIV-infected semen and took correct steps to avoid contact with it.

Such men need to be congratulated for having successfully negotiated the minefield of safe-sex information and for having come to decisions they can live with. What usually happens to them instead, however, is that they are made to feel guilty for not having engaged in "completely" safe sex.

Safer-sex campaigns, in fact-particularly those directed toward younger people-trade in such slogans as "No orgasm is worth risking your life for." But the premise behind these educational efforts is false. First, we could just as accurately say "No trip down the street for a Big Mac is worth risking your life for," but that would sound as ludicrous as it is. (Even though you could get run down in the crosswalk on your way there, be shot by a disgruntled postal worker while you're eating, or choke to death on a piece of gristle.)

Far more insidious, however, is the subtle judgment inherent in such slogans: that sex is a shameful and trivial pursuit and that anyone who acknowledges and even elevates the importance of sex in his or her life is pathetic and deluded. If I decide to take up skydiving, for example, people might think I'm crazy. But no one would call me immoral, irresponsible, or decadent. If I choose to take my risks in the sexual arena, on the other hand, I am likely to be called all of those things-or worse.

What safer-sex advocates have largely forgotten is that sex serves an important, even indispensable function in people's lives. It brings with it affection, approval, recreation, relaxation, joy, and lots of other good things that are part of what we might call the life force. For gay men, moreover, the symbolic significance of semen can hardly be overestimated. Not being able to take another man's cum into our bodies is not a trivial loss; and not being able to give our cum to someone else (or to "force" him to take it) wreaks havoc with what can be one of the hottest, most intimate interactions available through sex.

For men into SM, in addition, the power dynamic involved in fucking someone's mouth (or in worshipping your Daddy's dick) is not negligible. If we're going to take activities of such significance away from people, we have to replace them with something. But that is a task that safer-sex advocates have almost entirely abdicated. Rather, the best counsel they have to offer is that we "avoid" this or that activity or that we learn to "eroticize" condoms.

There's no question that making personal decisions about AIDS and sex takes us into territory that most of us find difficult to navigate. Safer-sex decisions always involve the weighing of risks against benefits, the balancing of threats to both physical and emotional health, and at least occasional forays into so-called "gray areas." The degree to which safer-sex advice fails to address these issues is the degree to which the people who need it most are being left to fend for themselves.

Footnotes

(i) Lifson, Alan R., Paul M. O'Malley, Nancy A. Hessol, et al. (1990). HIV Seroconversion in Two Homosexual Men After Receptive Oral Intercourse with Ejaculation: Implications for Counseling Concerning Safe Sexual Practices. American Journal of Public Health, 80(12), 1509-1511.

(ii) Ilaria, Gerard, Jonathan L. Jacobs, Bruce Polsky, et al. (12 December 1992). Detection of HIV-1 DNA sequences in pre-ejaculatory fluid. The Lancet, 340, 1469.

(iii) Pudney, Jeffrey, Monica Oneta, Kenneth Mayer, et al. (12 December 1992). Pre-ejaculatory Fluid as Potential Vector for Sexual Transmission of HIV-1. The Lancet, 340, 1470.

(iv) Samuel, Michael C., Nancy Hessol, Steve Shibokoshi, et al. (1993). Factors Associated with Human Immunodeficiency Virus Seroconversion in Homosexal Men in Three San Francisco Cohort Studies, 1984-1989. Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, 6, 303-312.

(v) Samuel, Michael C., Michael S. Mohr, Terence P. Speed, and Warren Winkelstein, Jr. (1994). Infectivity of HIV by Anal and Oral Intercourse Among Homosexual Men: Estimates from a Prospective Study in San Francisco. In Modeling the AIDS Epidemic: Planning, Policy, and Prediction, pp. 423-438. New York: Raven Press, p. 434.

(vi) Voeller, Bruce, Jerry Nelson, & Craig Day (1994). Viral leakage risk differences in latex condoms. AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, 10(6), pp. 701-710.