Don't Ask, Don't Light Up

[from 7/15/09]

One of the things I thought was going to happen, like the next day after Obama took office, was, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" would be rescinded and Obama would flat-out order the military to stop discharging homosexuals. Instead, after nearly six months of no movement on the subject we get a study commissioned by the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs recommending a total ban on cigarettes in the military, including a ban on smoking in quarters and a total ban on sales of cigarettes on bases.

Before I begin exhaling the rant that is just now forming in the pit of my tar-stained lungs, I should explain my relationship to the subject at hand. No, I am not a veteran, I was an army brat. And no, I don't smoke. Well, not for almost 12 years now. I watched my Army Dad smoke 3 packs a day for decades, getting incredible deals on cheap smokes even well into his retirement, first at Fort Lawton, and then when he couldn't buy them there, down in Fort Lewis. Then, I watched him die of cancer. So I totally get that smoking is bad for you. But I bet you get that, too, you've seen the PSAs. So we'll just brush that aside and get to the heart of the matter.

BEING A SOLDIER IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH.

Can we have warnings on military recruiters, pasted to their foreheads? "NOT IGNORING THIS MAN MAY RESULT IN SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH." "MILITARY SERVICE -- A LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH." "DON'T LET CHILDREN BE EXPLODED BY YOUR BOMBS."

We can't have gays in the military because it would be socially disruptive. Sort of like the kind of social disruption you get when you tell the one in three smokers in a room they not only can't smoke there, they can't smoke anywhere on the planet. The Pentagon will see Seattle's 25 foot rule, and raise it to a 25,000 mile rule.

And what about the security of this country? OK, I can't have gays in my country's military who can translate from Arabic to English and keep my ass from being blown up by Al Qaeda. Fine, I've come to accept that. But now I find out that my country will no longer be recruiting people who can't quit cigarettes, cigars, or chew, even though they know it could kill them (because they've seen the PSAs.) Excuse me, but who does that leave? Are we only going to be defended by mooses, squirrels, and aging Boy Scouts who still call their mothers every day? Are there really enough of those?

Then there's an irony that begs notice. There's the gay/cigarette connection. It's not widely known by you young people, but there was a time Marlboros were a favorite gay men's cigarette. When Marlboros were originally created in 1924, it was marketed as a woman's cigarette. The slogan was "Mild as May," and the ads showed a feminine hand (May's?) reaching for a pack. Straight men wouldn't touch them, and would be embarrassed to buy them in a store. Being filtered cigarettes, rude conceptions and ruder jokes sprang up in the culture. "Tampons" and "going bare-assed" come to mind. But Philip Morris didn't care as long as the product had a decent share of the market.

In World War II, sales of Marlboros tanked, so they started to think about changing their image. Eventually, in 1954, they came out with the Marlboro Man ads, forever linking even filtered cigarettes with macho straight images

As an immediate consequence gay men were forced to don cowboy hats and boots in order to continue to smoke their favored brand of cigarettes without clashing. This in turn led to the writing and production of Brokeback Mountain, but that's like death by cancer -- it's neither here nor there.

"What's your point, Wes?" OK, what are our servicemen supposed to do now during R & R, play Scrabble while sucking on beef jerky?

 

The Rights Stuff

If I ponder an imponderable, it can’t be really imponderable, can it? That’s just the sort of thing that keeps me, and people like me, awake for hours each and every night, and gives us the sense that life is long and filled with riches, when it’s actually a bleak and desolate wasteland, fraught with misery and pain, and not quick enough.

Speaking of Tim Eyman, what is his problem? He referred to the protections granted by the Gay Rights Bill as “special privileges” when they’re just the same privileges of non-discrimination we all expect. Does he have someone specifically in mind he would like to be able to refuse to rent to? Couldn’t he find a better excuse? Who let Eyman own property? Can’t we discriminate against twits?

I realize that neither the Gay Rights Bill nor Eyman’s initiative opposing it have any bearing on gay marriage, but I can’t get that issue out of my mind every night I’m trying to sleep either, so I am going to set forth my latest political theory on the topic anyway.

Here it is: Let the gays decide it themselves. By democracy!

Is that radical, or what? I’m saying, maybe they want to, maybe they don’t. Let’s make them vote on it among themselves, and leave the rest of us out of it. Sort of like when we let the Saudis democratically prohibit women from breathing and driving at the same time, and we let them be our allies anyway. Let’s introduce democracy to gays! Then if we don’t like what they decide, we can say something Rumsfeldian about it, like “democracy isn’t always a pretty sight, you know,” or “the road to democracy is sometimes bumpy, you know,” or “you sometimes don’t know you know, you know, don’t you know.” “Could I repeat the question? Of course I could. But it wouldn’t be constructive.”

Who knows? Maybe the gays would vote marriage down. After all, it defies all their gay traditions. Why do you think they’re called gay, anyway? Gay, as opposed to miserable. Why ruin that?

But what I’ve really been pondering at all hours of the day is, how is it that a nation that has the cajones to claim to be exporting freedom and democracy throughout the world can’t figure out which part of that package is the cart and which is the horse? Why are Americans so stupid when it comes to freedom and democracy, when we ought to be the world’s experts on the subject, since we tell the world every day that we are, and since we kill who knows how many innocent civilians in the course of teaching the world about freedom and democracy, all the time.

Here’s the deal, as worked out by none other than the guys like Madison and Jefferson, the people who brought freedom and democracy to Anglo-American landowners: Freedom first, democracy second.

First you decide who you are. Are you all the people? Then all the people have to be free. Are you just the white people? Then just the white people have to be free. Are you just the heterosexual people? Then decide what fraction of a human a gay person is.

If you can’t bring yourself to say, in writing, that a gay man is only three fifths human, and not worthy of a vote, and so take responsibility now and for all history for being that big of an ass, then you need to sit yourself down and grant him all the same civil rights everyone else gets.

Then you can have democracy.

You can’t call this or any other system a true democracy as long as you systematically limit the freedom of any of the people that make it up.

Civil rights are a moral absolute. No one has the right to deny others their civil rights, not even by means of the ballot box. Eyman’s initiative isn’t only wrong, it doesn’t deserve to exist.

Barbarism and Barbarella

As we've seen before, some weeks there's no news. Other weeks, like this one, there's too much. Where do I begin? How do I thread it all together? Is there a common theme, Wes? I often talk to myself this way, to feel as though I have close friends in my head.

Speaking of close friends, George Bush, a Christian, has close friends in Saudi Arabia's government and royalty. He might want to speak to them about the little raid conducted on a "clandestine" church in suburban Riyadh that netted 40 illegally worshipping Christians. Since it is legal to practice Christianity in Saudi Arabia in the privacy of one's own home (it's like drinking 40-ouncers here!) you would think that it would be GOOD that it was a clandestine church. That means "private." But the Saudi's don't see it that way. To them it means "sneaky."

Speaking of oppression of lifestyles -- and I bet you think I'm headed for Washington State's non-passage of a law to stop discriminating against gays, but no! I'll do that later! – we see that a "study" in England has determined that office workers suffer a greater loss of IQ from reading email and text-messages and taking phone calls at work than from smoking pot. Email etc. takes 10 points off your IQ, smoking pot takes only 4 points off.

I have so many questions at this point. 1) Where can I sign up to participate in such a study? I would like to have my IQ lowered by the pot, thank you. 2) When they say "study," what exactly do they mean, anyway? Do they just pass out the joints, take up clipboards, and walk around stroking their chins? Or are there electrodes implanted in brains? 3) Only 4 points off for the pot!? So why is it illegal!?

Oh, never mind, I know the answer to that last one! It's illegal because there's a law against it, and we can't have lawbreakers can we? Golly, I don't know if there is any connection, but here in the news it says that even though violent crime is way down in this country we still have more people in prison than just about any other country in the universe.

OK, one more news story and then I'll shut up for another week: we're talking about oppression again, only this time it isn't oppression of a lifestyle, exactly. We're talking about the incident that occurred while Jane Fonda was in Kansas City on her book tour, and a Vietnam Veteran, Michael Smith, spit tobacco juice in her face for having been a traitor to America who had "spit in the faces of war veterans for years."

Since many of you readers are too young to remember the Vietnam War, I will summarize it for you. We picked up the war right about where the French had lost it. It was popular for a while, then it became unpopular. So a lot of people expressed their displeasure with it, including the star of the movie Barbarella. Most of those people have not been accused of having spit in the faces of war veterans for years, since actually not as much of that occurred as has been reported. Jane Fonda herself did not ever spit, literally, in anyone's face, as far as I know. But Jane Fonda was the star of the movie Barbarella.

Tom Hayden could protest the war to his heart's content, but Jane Fonda was a woman, and that's all this is about. It isn't really even about Vietnam. It certainly isn't about treason, because Jane Fonda just wanted what our president at the time eventually gave us, and called good.

It's all about oppression. Mind your superiors. Don't pray to Jesus in Riyadh. Don't smoke pot. Three strikes and we'll put you away for life. No uppity women, especially during wars. Oh, yes, and don't forget Rule #9: There's always a war.

On Jesse and Other Hams

With the death of Pope John Paul II, we have lost a great friend of the poor and a great supporter of freedom and justice. I find myself thinking it cannot be. He's punking us, right? This is all a gag; the cardinals are in on it; they'll go through the whole process of picking some unknown as the new pope -- white smoke, black smoke, white smoke, black smoke – the new guy will step forward, and -- surprise! -- it's John Paul II again.

Of course, we here at Irony Central feel it is our duty to laboriously root out and expose ironies wherever they are, even surrounding the recently deceased. So we can't help but note that some of JP II's so-called socially conservative positions yield delicious ironies.

Let's take his opposition to the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. It may not be ironic that the Pope considered rubber prophylactics to be unnatural means of preserving the benefits of abstinence without preserving the form, while he considered a tube surgically introduced to the stomach by way of the navel (in grotesque imitation of God's own umbilical cord) to be a perfectly natural means of preserving the benefits of eating, without preserving the form. But there is literal irony in the way that John Paul insisted during his last days on not being taken to an intensive care unit.

Speaking of people whom I mostly agree with but not always, I was struck by Jesse Jackson's last minute push to restore Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. One of his assertions in that regard was especially interesting. He said, "We cannot hide behind the law and not have mercy."

Overlooking the debate over the notion that it is mercy to ignore someone's wish to die with dignity, I see Jackson equating obedience to the law and support of the courts' decrees with evading moral responsibility. This from a man who would have been president?

Here's another rule of mine: if a private citizen disobeys the law in the interests of doing what he thinks is morally right, that's civil disobedience. But if an elected official disobeys the law in the interests of doing what he thinks is morally right, he's substituting his morals for the people's laws and our constitution, and so then he's an arrogant ass.

Jesse Jackson is only spared that judgment by never having been elected. But he tried to talk Jeb Bush into being an arrogant ass. And the irony is: Jeb Bush wasn't! What a strange world we all live and die in.

I'm reminded of another irony connected to Reverend Jesse Jackson that I passed up last year. Remember the big flap about gay marriage that everybody was jabbering about during the presidential campaign? During that time Jesse made a little speech at Harvard in which he downplayed comparisons of the gay civil-rights movement with that of African Americans, saying, "No slave was ever enslaved because he was gay."

In fact, during the slave era, enslavement of Africans was justified on a bogus theory that they descended from a gay man! And Reverend Jackson, being a reverend, should have known that!

You see, there's this passage in the Bible that says one of Noah's sons, namely Ham, "saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without." So then Noah cursed Canaan (son of Ham) with perpetual servitude.

During the slavery era, that little passage was widely interpreted like so: Ham actually had sex with his drunken, passed-out, father, euphemisms aside. "Canaan" did not refer to just one of Ham's sons, but "Canaan" was taken to stand for all the descendants of the offender Ham. These included all black Africans in the view of Christians of those days.

Of course, nobody thought that Ham's crime was solely what we would call it today: incestual rape. No, it was seen primarily as committing a homosexual act. There's your irony.

You Can't Say That!

It's a good time to recall the standard disclaimer: the author of this column, me, Dr. Wes Browning, is solely responsible for its content. Real Change, its management, staff, and volunteers have all said on many occasions that I, Dr. Wes, am nuts, and they assume no liability for anything I say here or anywhere else.

I had just finished saying, last week, that Susan Sontag was right about something and that Ed Koch may or may not have been. I also mentioned the Planters Nut Company. What you all may not have known, because I didn't tell you, was that last week's entire column was an attempt to write about Ward Churchill that got sidetracked.

Ward Churchill is the Colorado University professor who has taken a lot of flak for an essay he wrote after the 9-11 attacks in which he pointed out that the Pentagon was a military target and added that many (not all) of the people in the World Trade Towers at the time of the attack were willing participants in "America's global financial empire." One particular phrase that fetched Mr. Churchill a heap of heat was "little Eichmanns."

"Oh boy, talking about this will be fun!" That's what I've been thinking. I thought, "Let's talk about Nazi technocrats and the Americans who can be compared to them, ha, ha!" That's when I remembered what Susan Sontag said and got distracted.

Now Bill Maher has got back in the news and distracted me. Bill Maher said essentially the same thing that Sontag said, that the 9-11 attackers had not been cowards, whatever else they were, and got his show yanked from TV. Now he's back with a new TV show and he's getting himself in deep by disparaging evangelical Christians, and the conservative Christians are romping all over him.

OK, he said something real bad about Christians in general, and it was TOTALLY inappropriate. Christians do NOT all have neurological disorders. Bad talk-show man! BAD! No talk-show man cookie!

As if that isn't distracting enough, Chris Rock gets picked to host the Oscars and he lets fly that he thinks no straight black man would ever watch the Oscars and that, in general, awards for art are f-ing idiotic. You might think that would mostly offend gays, but actually right-wing conservatives are doing most of the complaining, with the same ones calling for his dismissal from the Oscars as are calling for Bill Maher's new show to be cancelled.

Just as I'm hearing about all this and I'm reassuring myself that everything is all right, we still have First Amendment protection of freedom of speech in this country, I find out that the House of Representatives passes a so-called Broadcast Decency Act which will give federal regulators power to levy massive fines against broadcasters for airing material they deem indecent.

Remember when conservatives used to oppose regulation of markets?

There I go again, digressing. Which as I see it is the continuing problem, and what's wrong with the whole picture.

Instead of having a serious national discussion about what Ward Churchill said, we are immersed in a war of words over whether he should be allowed to keep his job, having said that much. We are all forced to join the fight to keep the debate open rather than debating. Things like the Broadcast Decency Act only serve to prove that we are right to be concerned. Today they would fine CBS for an exposed breast; tomorrow it will be for a quote from Chris Rock (or even Alfred Kinsey); the next day it will be for "unpatriotic" speech.

All of which keeps all of us from talking about the extent to which Ward Churchill was right, and in all the confusion no one notes what the corporations that built the World Trade Towers do to the rest of the world in our names.

It's All About the Timing

We've all had our bad hair days. But me, I get bad column days.

Everything was going great. Bush and Kerry were falling off things. Philadelphia's horse lost. We all had long faces. Chalabi had a long face. We saw comic possibilities.

CIA-George resigned, for "personal reasons." We thought of some lame ways to make fun of "personal reasons" in general. We could recall the "personal reason" we had once for paying a fine for late taxes, for instance. We had reasoned that we didn't want our person in a federal prison. Or the time we had a "personal reason" for quitting a job, reasoning that our employers were about to anyway toss our person headfirst out the nearest window.

Then we heard that there were some unofficial but strong hints that the Salvation Army in New York City might give up millions upon millions of dollars worth of social service contracts, including contracts to manage homeless shelters and soup kitchens, in the event that the city went ahead with a law making them pay benefits to employees married to the wrong sexes.

We want homelessness to end, but until that happens we want there to be homeless shelters. We want there to be soup kitchens as long as there are poor people whether homeless or not. In NYC rents are already as high as they will be here in week or two, so they need soup kitchens everywhere for the people who have no money left over after the rent. Our president, meanwhile, wants to promote the idea that faith-based organizations like the Salvation Army should be the principal providers of those kind of services.

What does it say about the president's Faith-Based Initiative when one of the biggest faith-based providers in the country exploits its clients to blackmail a city over social policies, rather than fighting those policies fairly through lobbying and litigation? I'll tell you what it says. It says that daddy has a column landing in his lap! Come to papa, sweet column!

Just as I was working out the details on that impending masterpiece, which was going to be the greatest and most timely and relevant sludge of rant that I ever slogged through, Ronald Reagan screws me royal. How can I write about the NYC Salvation Army's disappointing petty snit-fit when there's a magnitude 7.5 wake going on?

I asked that very question of my muse Cindy. For those of you who may have forgotten, Cindy is my own personal muse, the Muse of Other, AKA the Muse of Few Words. Eternally a henna-redhead until Wednesday, Cindy is a Spark off the Generic Muse Archetype, hence to that extent Universal, but, hey, get your own Spark.

Cindy said, "Well, you're annoyed Reagan picked right now to die, right? So why don't you write about how annoyed you are? I'm sure you're annoyed enough to fill your white space up."

Yes I am…

With a deadline minutes away all I can think is Borax and California actor-governors for $200, Alex, a chimp, jellybeans, Star Wars, "Win one for the Gipper," who really won the Cold War, Ronnie or the Soviets and their people, and Iran-Contra and Ollie North and Hinckley and Jodie and Nancy and stem cells.

Most of all I think if it wasn't for Reagan and his administration I wouldn't be writing here lo these nine years. If it wasn't for Reagan's initiatives, adopted just because he was such a smiling optimistic guy, homelessness wouldn't have reached the crisis proportions that it did starting in the mid-eighties, becoming so unmanageable by now that the Bush administration is ready to betray Section 8 housing and consign more than a million homeless people permanently to living in shelters run by immoral faith-based hypocrites who despise the people they get paid to serve so much they would use them as pawns in their cultural battles.

… very annoyed.

Whites Priced At Five Dollars Each

Let's talk about religion!

No, let's not talk about religion! I don't want the headaches! Let's talk about religious authorities instead. Don't religious authorities do the darndest things? I guess it's because they're authorities.

Take your imams, for example. With all the war and misery going on in highly Islamic quarters of the world these days, I would be very surprised if the world's imams weren't making pronouncements right and left. But the other day when I went looking on Islam.com for a pronouncement or two to get the flavor of them, I didn't expect to see a fatwa on the importance of men tucking their shirts in. (Just so you know, the imam issuing the fatwa basically says tucking the shirt in isn't necessarily evil, although he personally would never do it.)

With that kind of focus on gender-specific grooming tips vis a vis fiery hell, you can all imagine for yourselves how the fatwa on homosexuality read on the very same page. Likewise re the archived fatwa on the same site concerning surgical hymen restoration. Hint from me on that one: "If you break it -- you pay for it." OK, that hint sucked. Let's try this one: "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten. Now go publicly bury this bucket of kittens in your front yard, you harlot."

Speaking of homosexuality, I want to take time out to say that, although I am not myself a homosexual so far as I am aware of, I am deeply grateful that the Supreme court has now recognized my right to practice sodomy in the privacy of my own bedroom with consenting adults, because I've been doing it anyway.

Of course Islamic imams do not hold the monopoly on fatwas. The Vatican just issued one of their own on gay marriages. Having once been a card-carrying member of the Catholic Church (in my impetuous youth I favored the classics) I find its decrees delightful and fascinating. In much the same way that I find forced live oyster eating riveting. This particular decree compares especially well with the shirt tucking decree in its decreeness, or decree-osity.

Will someone please explain to me how exactly does allowing at least civil homosexual marriages undermine heterosexual marriages? What exactly do people think is going to happen? Do they think all the straight guys are going to wake up one morning and think, "Hey, I could have married one of my buds!" and immediately divorce the wife and ditch the kids and elope with Steve in accounting?

The Vatican decree whinges on and on about the blessed sanctity of procreation, as if allowing gay marriage is going to make one iota of difference to the frequency of condom failures during straight sex.

But enough of that nonsense. What I really want to talk about here isn't a fatwa or decree, but it's still coming from a religious authority. I want to talk about Bishop Fred Caldwell's decision to pay white people to come and diversify his overwhelmingly Black-attended church in Shreveport, Louisiana. Five dollars for Sunday masses, fifteen for Thursdays.

Whoa! Can you say "spiritual ho's?" My first reaction was to recall that when an impoverished homeless guy I was often bribed with food to attend meals. I thought: this just cuts through the BS. They pay the money; I can spend it the way I want. Maybe I don't want turkey tetrazinni. Maybe I'm in the mood for chicken diablo. It's my choice.

But then I thought, wait a minute, what's all this saying? I mean, first of all, how white do you have to be to collect your fee? Does a Quarter-white get $1.25 on Sundays? Does Michael Jackson get anything; does effort count? How about comportment?

You know, if it were me, in Louisiana, I'd pay more for an Asian than a white person, out of supply considerations.

When someone suggested that Bishop Fred might give the money to the poor instead, he said that that was the sort of thing Judas Iscariot would have proposed. I'm wondering: if Judas Iscariot were to tell Bishop Fred not to jump off a bridge, would he do it?