Category: Liberal Rants

Thoughtful posts on why the neopaleolithic viewpoint, while perhaps valid for its adherents, is yet not the way I want my country run.

Marriage equality and language

Posted on by Dale

With the gay marriage debate all over but the tossing of the bouquet, I have begun to wonder about language: how will it change to adapt and codify the new reality?

We went through the same kind of thing back when couples started living together instead of getting married at all: is she your “girlfriend”? “Roommate”? I had one friend in college who insisted on introducing her boyfriend as her LOVER, said practically exactly like that. It made me giggle then, and it still does. (She still introduces James as her lover, forty years later.)

Most of society has settled for “partner,” and in fact gay couples have benefitted from that so far.  But now we’re talking matrimony, and “partner” has already been codified as “unmarried sexytime person,” so that won’t really do. (Side note: when someone I don’t know well talks to me about their partner, there is always that slippery moment when I listen extra sharp to establish context: is he telling me he’s gay and in a committed relationship, or is he talking about the guy with whom he owns and operates the Harley-Davidson franchise?) (Or both?)

I brought up the topic last night in a discussion, and my lovely first wife promptly epitomized the problem by framing it as, “Which one’s the husband and which one’s the wife?”

That lays bare rather explicitly our sexual assumptions about it all, doesn’t it? It seems to me, I offered, that the first step is to disconnect what goes on in the bedroom (or at least our curiosity about it) from the terms we use in invitations, announcements, and office chitchat. It is not necessary for one person to be the “husband” and one the “wife” in a marriage, if by that we mean fulfilling traditional sexual roles.

We already have a useful term, of course, in “spouse.” Just like “partner,” it wouldn’t be hard for society to begin to prefer the gender-neutral term, but I suspect that for quite a while yet, we’re all still going to be curious about which flavor spouse we’ve invited to dinner.

Using “spouse” as a society would also help us reign in those who might insist on flaunting their sexytimes, which is not in good taste no matter who you are. A same-sex couple who insist on being called “husband” and “wife” are dragging the terms right back into traditional sex role territory that we should be glad to escape. We get it: you’re having sex. What no one wants to know (about any relationship) is the nature of the sex you’re having. It would be like a straight couple insisting on being referred to as “mistress” and “slave” outside the confines of their bedroom. What would the Dowager Countess say?

Not only that, but that way madness lies: if Joe tells me all about what he and his wife did over the weekend, and then Joe’s wife turns out to be a barrel-chested lumberjack, I think I am right to declare shenanigans. There’s also then the spectacle of two men claiming each other as “wife,” and on and on. Too much granularity when all we really need to know is whether you’re living with someone as partner or spouse, and if so, what gender they are just so we can be polite whenever we’re chatting about the weekend.

My prediction is that for a long while we’ll call all men who get married “grooms” and “husbands,” and women will be “brides” and “wives,” alternating with “spouse” when it feels right. Of course, it will all get easier over time: we will already know that Joe is married to Brett, or that Susan has a girlfriend, or who Dale means when he refers to his lovely first wife.

And eventually, we’ll simply ask our new coworker if he’s married and if the answer is yes, then, “Why don’t you ask your spouse to join us for drinks Friday afternoon?” without wondering in the least which flavor is going to show up at Alamo Jack’s.

Dear Fox News: Shut up.

Posted on by Dale

::sigh::

So even if we were talking about a 102-year-old Klansman waiting to vote for the zombie Strom Thurman—which we’re not, but even if we were—here’s the rule: when you’re 102 years old, you get a pass. For everything. No one is allowed to mock you. For anything.

The fact that anyone has to explain this to Fox News is a sad commentary on Fox News.

Additionally, at no time should you have to stand in line for three hours to vote. Even if you’re zombie Strom Thurmond in a wheelchair.

Personally, I’d like to know why those standing in line simply didn’t pass her up to the front—there you go, Fox News, mock those losers. But leave the 102-year-old alone. Losers.

Fragment #4

Posted on by Dale

So, the founder of Domino’s has a sad.

One of the more offensive comments rightwingers make about employers not wanting to provide their female employees with perfectly legal medication as part of their healthcare is that if women don’t like the religiousy beliefs of their employers, they are free to seek employment elsewhere.

I have a counter-offer: if Tom Monaghan’s deeply held religiousy beliefs conflict with the law of the land, he is free to sell off his interests and go do something else.

Fragment #2

Posted on by Dale

I can see how my new resolution could rapidly turn ugly.

Today’s shooting in Newtown, CT, is already prompting the usual handwringing, and I for one am sick of it. If I were President Obama, I would call the usual idiots from the NRA to the White House and tell them in no uncertain terms: “No more dead children. You write the laws to make sure that happens, or I will. Your choice.”

But I digress.

Mike Huckabee, who often plays a sane person on Fox News, took a stance on the tragedy today. It’s pretty clear, he says, that the problem is that we’ve taken God out of the schools. “We don’t have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem,” he intones.

Let me get this straight—and I want it noted that I deserve full credit for not using the full range of expletives and naughty words at my command—am I to understand that because this nation renders unto God/Caesar what is theirs, that God thinks it’s appropriate to send a crazy person to take a gun and kill children?

Does anyone else have a problem with this?

update: Jesus.

Fragment #1

Posted on by Dale

I haven’t been getting blog posts out of my head onto the page for a while—a long while—and so last night I decided on a plan of action:

  1. Move my WordPress app to the dock on my iPad, where it is always in front of me.
  2. Stop waiting to formulate coherent thoughts into well-crafted essays.

So here we go. Fragments.

Today we have Bobby Jindal, the up-and-coming-Republican-who-totally-does-not-look-like-Kenneth-the-Page,[1] totally solving the birth control issue. The birth control issue, you may recall, has nothing to do with women being afforded the opportunity to control their reproductive systems, but is all about the religiousy[2] freedomy stuff. Corporations should not have to violate their religiousy freedoms by offering birth control when it conflicts with their deeply held religiousy beliefs.

First of all, before we get to Jindal’s Gordian solution, I have to say that I was unaware that corporations had deeply held religious beliefs. We all know that they’re people, at least since 1886, but do corporations pray? More on that in a moment.

Jindal, in the meantime, wants to help everyone out. And it’s so easy! Just make birth control available over the counter instead of by prescription! So easy! Now corporations don’t have to violate their deepliest held religiousy beliefs and provide contraceptives to their female employees—those slutty slut sluts can simply go buy it themselves! Thereby placing a financial burden uniquely on their female employees not borne by those other employees, i.e., men!

Oh, wait.

Here’s the deal on corporations’ deeply held religiousy beliefs. It’s bull. All of it. If the owner of Job’s Christian Widgets does not believe in birth control, he does not have to buy it. She does not have to buy it. Whatever.

But he/she does have to provide it in Job’s Christian Widgets’ health insurance as a matter of health. And why is this not a violation of Mr./Mrs. Job’s own personal deeply held religiousy beliefs? Because providing health insurance (which employees are at least in part paying for) does not keep Mr./Mrs. Job from worshipping freely. At all. Ever. In any way.

Matter of conscience, you say? Bushwah. Let us presume that Mr./Mrs. Job is a good old-fashioned Southern Baptist. Leaving aside the fact that Southern Baptists didn’t give a rat’s ass about contraceptives until about 40 years ago, we can guess that he/she is still completely opposed to the consumption of alcohol, and yet there is no movement afoot to support stripping JCW’s employees of their ability to have a cold one after work. (Or the deeply religiousy Mr./Mrs. Job themselves, for that matter. The corporation, on the other hand, might have difficulty doing shots with the gang after the shift.)

Mr. Jindal’s brilliant solution is just one more rightwing “tails we win, heads you lose” proposals.

—

[1] Totally a GHP alumnus, Theatre 90
[2] My new word. Religiousy : Religion :: Truthiness : Truth

Libertà!

Posted on by Dale

There is an odd moment in Mozart’s Don Giovanni that perplexes directors and audiences alike, near the end of Act I.  The Don is giving a party, deliberately taunting his enemies, and as he welcomes them he seemingly out of nowhere cries, “Viva la libertà!”— “Hurray for Liberty!”  The others take up the cry, often coming downstage to deliver themselves of this stirring sentiment.  Trumpets and drums, which we have not heard since the Overture, make it a rousing, if confusing, moment, which vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

I was reminded of this as I tootled across the back roads of Georgia on my GHP RESA World Tour recently: my iPhone was set to play my 7500 tracks of music randomly, and that scene popped up somewhere between Statesboro and Waycross.  And that in turn reminded me of my experience at Atlanta Opera last season with their execrable production of Don Giovanni.

Costumes were fine, set was fine, the orchestra was good, and most of the singers were acceptable, although the Don himself was very shaky.  But none of them could act, and it looked as they didn’t have a director at all, because whoever directed it simply didn’t.  I am not exaggerating when I say that I could have blocked that entire three-and-a-half hour show in one rehearsal, one short rehearsal.  Everyone just came on, walked to their spot, faced downstage, and sang. It was excruciating.

Giovanni is a tough nut to crack.  Our main character is an abusive, self-gratifying, self-justifying sleazeball.  His servant Leporello is a codependent toady.  His opponents, the “good guys,” are both hapless and feckless, especially Don Ottavio, the fiancé of Donna Anna, whose father Giovanni kills in the opening scene while trying to escape from Anna’s bedroom.  Ottavio spends the entire opera dithering about who the killer is (Giovanni was masked) and whether or not it might not be maybe Don Giovanni and what he might maybe do about that if he could only be sure.  Maybe.  More about that in a moment.

I’ve never been sure how Mozart means us to take Giovanni.  He’s clearly a not-nice person, but he’s the main character, and the non-evil people are just tools in his hands (besides being simply tools like Ottavio and Masetto, the peasant lout whose fiancée Zerlina Giovanni tries to seduce.)  In the end, he is dragged to hell by the statue of the Commendatore, Donna Anna’s dead father, and it’s extremely unclear whether we’re supposed to be smug in our righteous condemnation of the brute, or overcome with admiration at our boy’s proud refusal to repent and to become “other than he is.”

So anyway, Atlanta Opera’s director failed to crack the nut, and the audience’s tolerance of the stage action got increasingly thinner until the final scene, when Don Ottavio rushes onstage, finally ready to punish the vile seducer, only to find that his dead father-in-law has beat him to it.  The audience howled with derisive laughter.

It got worse.  That climactic scene is followed by the lamest ending ever: Donna Anna & Ottavio, Leporello, Zerlina & Masetto, and Donna Elvira (Giovanni’s deluded stalker) all stand and sing what they’ll do next:

  • Let’s get married. (Ottavio)
  • Sure, but we have to wait a year. (Anna)
  • I’ll enter a convent. (Elvira, who has spent the entire opera essentially begging Giovanni to do her one more time.)
  • I guess I’ll find a new master. (Leporello)
  • We’ll go get breakfast. (Zerlina & Masetto)

Mercy.  Then there’s the rousing final sextet, where they all sing how good is rewarded and evil punished.

Sure.  Whatever.  Curtain.

As fate would have it, the next day after this performance I received an email from Atlanta Opera asking me to rate my experience.  With raised eyebrows and pursed lips, I set to it.

After a series of questions asking whether I thought it was appropriate for the Bank of America to be a corporate sponsor—sure, I said, just like a Mexican drug cartel: money is money—they asked what the most enjoyable part of the evening was for me.

I was able to reply truthfully that it was during the curtain call, when I had a vision: wouldn’t it be a blast if while our idiot good guys are singing their platitudes about good always winning out, we see behind them the devils from the finale climbing out of the floor and dusting themselves off; followed by the Commendatore, whose statue costume we noted looked a little ratty when we first saw it; followed by Don Giovanni himself, who pulls out a roll of bills and pays them all off.  He makes his escape while his enemies congratulate themselves on their virtue.

He is the 1%: throughout, he uses his position and his wealth to abuse everyone around him for his own pleasure, and even when they think they’ve got him cornered, he buys his way out of it.  We’ve seen it happen the entire opera, and so when he fakes his own death, we are not surprised.

Why Atlanta Opera doesn’t hire me, I’ll never know.

Anyway, back to libertà.  I hadn’t really given my epiphany a second thought since typing it into the email survey form with such grim pleasure, but when that scene played out on GA-121, it all made sense.  Giovanni, after inviting his worst enemies to a party where he intends to seduce Zerlina right in front of them, distracts them with cries of Liberty! Freedom!  And like the pitiful sheep they are, they sing right along while he moves in on the peasant girl (who never gives in, by the way).

What else are they going to do? He’s the 1%.  Suckers.

My prayer for Rick Santorum

Posted on by Dale

I am unabashedly glad that Rick Santorum is out of the race for the Republican nomination, although I will miss the easy potshots. Amidst the general hilarity, however, there is a serious side that has not been in the spotlight, and that is that Santorum’s daughter Bella is quite ill.

Bella Santorum is three years old, and she shouldn’t be: she has Trisomy 18, a genetic defect wherein there are three copies of chromosome 18 instead of the usual two, causing abnormalities of the brain and heart.  Most infants, if they make it to birth at all, die soon after.

Rick Santorum has mentioned his daughter rarely, and mostly in support of his anti-abortion stance.  He walks the talk, and even though he misses the point that it was a very brave choice on his and his wife’s part, I respect him for that.  No parent should have to go through what Rick and Karen Santorum have been though with Bella, and my heart goes out to them.

Nevertheless, as Santorum kneels in prayer by his precious daughter’s bed, I have a prayer for him.  I pray that at some point, as he asks to know God’s will for him and his family, that God lets him understand, in a flash, that Bella’s medical care is very, very expensive, and that very, very few people in this nation could afford it like he can.

May God also grant him the insight that without the entire nation lending a hand, no one can afford it.  His kind (“severely” conservative) often rebut the argument for universal healthcare by saying that it’s not the government’s job.  It’s the church’s or family’s, they say.  May God help him understand the impossibility of what he dreams is the case.

Using that argument, the odious Rick Warren recently tweeted The Church has helped the poor far more than any govt, & for 2000 yrs longer! In 2011 our 1 church fed 70,000 unemployed.  I’m not even going to dissect that; Karoli and Slacktivist have done a much better job, and they are people of deeper faith than I.

I want Rick Santorum stricken to his knees like Paul on the road to Damascus, and to rise up with new knowledge.  Like Paul, I expect that Santorum would remain obdurate about every other aspect of his political view, but if the scales could be struck from his eyes about health care in this nation, I imagine it would be a good thing.  And like Paul, I expect he would be just as ferocious in fighting for universal health care as he was in opposing it.

(Irrelevant sidenote: I was just re-reading 2 Timothy and was struck by how whiny Paul was: everybody had abandoned him and returned to their rational Græco-Roman mindset; poor baby, nobody wanted to accompany him into an existence of restricted, hair-shirted faith and celibacy–wonder why?)

So, Rick Santorum, bless you and your daughter, and may you emerge from this trial with a new understanding of what it means to be sick and dying in the greatest nation on earth—and your role in that.

A liberal rant

Posted on by Dale

Here, go read this.  I’ll wait.

For those of you too lazy to do so, here’s the money quote:

“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. “Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”

My.  One’s heart aches for him, ne-c’est pas?

I am reminded of my first couple of years in the classroom, in the building that is now the Central Education Center.  At the time, it was Central High School and served as the 9th-10th grade campus for Newnan High School.

Before 1970 or so, it was the high school of the black school system here in Newnan.  Yes, we had three school systems: Newnan, Coweta County, and the black school system.  I don’t even remember its official name.  But in 1971, we took the bold step not only of consolidating the city and county schools, but also integrating at the same time.  Could have been madness—it was boring, thank goodness.

Anyway, five years later and I’m back in my hometown teaching, and lo! parents were beginning to get a tad upset because their children were attending a school that was completely under-equipped, especially in the science labs.  How could the school system permit such a thing?

And I thought at the time, You assholes—it was fine for the Negroes to attend that school and not have any Erlenmayer flasks.  Perhaps if you had taken care of those students and their education, you wouldn’t be having this problem now.

It’s the Commons, people: take care of everyone and what we all  hold in common, and we will all benefit. Take care of your enclosure, and eventually you will suffer as well.  That’s something that even Ayn Rand and her slaves to selfishness might understand.

So, Mr. Dlugash, if that is your real name, if you had been more ferociously supportive of the public schools, making sure they were delivering excellent education to every single child no matter what the income level of their parents, you might not have such a terrible terrible dilemma on your hands now.  So can I imagine what it’s like for you?  Yeah.  Can I comprehend it? Nope.  Sorry.