Ancient Romans remind us: gay marriage nothing new

     I listened to as much of Tuesday's Supreme Court oral arguments about gay marriage as I could stand.
     Because if you don't recognize the humanity of gay people, then allowing them to marry seems arbitrary. Thus Justice Samuel Alito wondered why couldn't, oh, four people marry? The implication being, once you open the door to these non-people, anything is possible. I'm surprised he didn't add, "or a person and a chair? Or a person and a tree?" 
     Most maddening was the invocation of tradition, of justices who normally scorn precedent from other countries suddenly groping to Ancient Greece, to tribal societies, as if the collective hatreds of the past add up to fairness now. As if ancient Babylon were now our moral compass.

     "This definition has been with us for millennia," said Justice Kennedy.  "As far as I'm aware, there's never been a nation or a culture that recognizes marriage of the same sex." 

     Umm, if it please the court, au contraire, you ahistorical asshats. I would like to enter into evidence a  column that ran in the paper 10 years ago and is, sadly, as if ripped from the headlines. Plus a link to Juvenal's second satire, which is no big flippin' state secret. The truth is that gay people got married to the degree that whatever repressive society they found themselves in would permit. 

     'I have a ceremony to attend," lisps one of Juvenal's loathed fellow Romans, more than 1,900 years ago. "At dawn tomorrow in the Quirinal valley."
     "What is the occasion?" chirps his dainty pal.
     "No need to ask," says the first. "A friend is taking to himself a husband; quite a small affair." And off they trot to the ceremony.
     Like a good many Americans, apparently, Juvenal hated gays—he hated lots of things but had a special hate for homosexuals.
     That is the beauty of the classics. They remind us that the issues we tie ourselves into a knot about, and consider evidence of our own fallen state, are really the evergreen issues of history, only we don't know it because we're too busy trying to shove our religious dogma down strangers' throats.
     A handy people to hate

     Homosexuality was open and tolerated in Rome, and, perhaps for that reason, Juvenal can barely wait to launch into them in his Satires—a quick introduction damning the clatter and corruption of the empire and then, boom, the entire second satire, a rant against gays for their effeminacy, their brazenness, and the very existence of guys such as Gracchus, the former priest of Mars, who has the audacity to actually marry somebody, who "decks himself out in a bridal veil" and weds in a little ceremony.
     Anything familiar here? The similarities are quite stunning. Grumpy old Juvenal—the patron saint of crusty pundits—ridicules the short crew cuts of these queers, "their hair shorter than their eyebrows," and presciently predicts our exact situation regarding gay marriage.
     "Yes," he writes. "And if we only live long enough, we shall see these things done openly: People will wish to see them reported among the news of the day.''
     I guess we're there now, what with the marriage announcements in the New York Times, and after the Massachusetts court all but ordered the flowers for gay marriages in the Bay State this spring by pointing out that—sorry—there's nothing in our sacred Constitution that specifically permits denying people their civil rights based on sexual orientation.
     That may change. We seem to be gearing up for the vast, expensive and time-gobbling exercise of ripping up our nation's bedrock—our operating code, to use computer language— all so we can protect ... what is it exactly? So we can preserve ... umm ... I guess so that conservatives will feel better.
     Odd. We oppose gays based on our morality, based on our Bible. So did Juvenal. He waved morality and he worshipped Zeus. We point to nature—they can't have kids! So did Juvenal. He was horrified by gays because of what he saw as womanishness, and a violation of nature. Juvenal offers up the monstrous image of women giving birth to calves and lambs and then shudders, "horreres maioraque monstra putares" -- "you may be aghast and consider such men even greater freaks."
     That's saying a lot. The thinking man, rather than plunge into the political maelstrom emerging from Massachusetts, might instead wonder why we as a nation would want to beat ourselves up, in exactly the same way, over exactly the same people, as Juvenal did in 85 A.D. Haven't we made any progress?
     Bigger fish to fry

     And don't say the Roman empire collapsed of decadence. We're about 500 years short of matching their record. The Romans collapsed because they ignored the gathering peril. Which is what we are doing. I don't care half as much about gays tying the knot as I do with our country—and all its problems—somehow avoiding wasting the next five years on picking over this timeless hatred.
     Juvenal was a failure, reduced to living off scraps. I think that's why I like him. He was totally obscure; had no impact whatsoever in his day, a career path I relate to.
     But he was better than gays, in his mind. That's what this is about. Ever since black people joined white society in America, the Bible-thumping haters have looked for another class to feel superior to, and gays, as they have for thousands of years, serve nicely. Though I can't help wondering how a Christian and a pagan—and, for that matter, the Nazis—could find themselves all on the same page about the same people.

   —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Feb. 6, 2004

"The passage of time has not dulled the ache"

   
     Armed Services Radio played "White Christmas," the signal for the last Americans to leave Saigon.
     Or maybe not. Like so much about the Vietnam War, which ended 40 years ago Thursday, there is controversy. Some claim they never heard the song, ergo it never played.
     But others insist they heard it, though not the Bing Crosby version, but Tennessee Ernie Ford's.
     In the end it doesn't matter.
     It was the morning of April 29, 1975. The North Vietnamese Army encircled the city. Explosions sounded in the distance. Americans and their South Vietnamese allies, friends and family had been leaving for weeks. One plane from Operation Babylift, the evacuation of 2,000 war orphans, crashed, killing 151 aboard. "We have plenty more," a South Vietnamese lieutenant quipped bitterly.
     The streets were chaos. Once the communists arrived, anyone with connection to the Americans could expect to be killed. Crowds massed around the gates of the American embassy. Some brought their luggage, heartbreaking, hope to make flights they were promised. A mother hurled her baby over the high fence, guarded by 52 U.S Marines.
     The Vietnam War probably has to be explained for some readers. After World War II, Communists fought to control the country, but were kept at bay by their former colonial overlords, the French, who bugged out in the mid-1950s. America stupidly replaced them, beginning with advisors during the Kennedy administration. We thought, mistakenly, that a communist victory would spread to neighboring nations.
     The war exploded under Lyndon Johnson, who could neither quit nor win. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the United States was torn by protests, led by young people who were being drafted to serve and die in a cause where even its supporters, Martin Luther King said in a 1967 sermon, were "half-hearted, confused, and doubt-ridden."
     Faith in government was shaken when the lies that the Johnson administration told trying to cover up military failures came to light. Johnson became so unpopular that he didn't bother running for re-election in 1968, making him one of the rare presidents in American history not to seek a second term.
     He was followed by Richard Nixon, whose Republican Party, in echoes of today with Iran, tried to undermine LBJ's frantic efforts toward peace. Nixon would spread the war into Cambodia and Laos, secretly. He had been hounded from office in the Watergate scandal, resigning in August, 1974, and while Watergate and our defeat in Vietnam aren't generally connected in the public mind, they should be. Watergate crippled the presidency so it could no longer prosecute the deeply-unpopular war, and an emboldened Congress refused to do so.
     The morning of April 29, advancing Vietcong sent rockets into the Saigon airport, killing two Marines, Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge, the last of the 56,559 American servicemen to die in Vietnam. They were 21 and 19 years old. Their bodies were left behind. A defecting South Vietnamese pilot dropped his bombs on the last operating runway. After that only helicopters could come and go, ferrying to American warships in the harbor, in what is still the largest helicopter evacuation in history — 1,300 Americans and 5,600 Vietnamese in 19 hours.
     At 3 a.m., April 30, local time, as the crowds around the U.S. Embassy began to climb the fences, the last 11 American Marines pulled back to the rooftop of the six-story building, locking the doors, floor by floor, as they went up.
     "Then everything came to a standstill and we just sat," Master Sergeant John Valdez later wrote. "All the Marines were up there. No birds in sight."
     The choppers had been coming every 10 minutes. Now the Marines crouched, listening to gunshots, to the mob in the embassy courtyard. "I never thought for one minute that the choppers would leave us behind," Valdez wrote in Leatherneck magazine in 1975.
     A whirr was heard overhead. The Marines fired a smoke grenade to mark their position. One last CH-46 Sea Knight hovered, and landed on the embassy roof. The 10 Marines clambered aboard, followed by Valdez, holding the folded embassy flag, the last U.S. soldier to depart what historian Paul Johnson calls "the most shameful defeat in the whole of American history."
     Gerald Ford, not known for eloquence, echoed T.S. Eliot.
     "April 1975 was indeed the cruelest month," he wrote, in 2000. "The passage of time has not dulled the ache of those days."

No one cries like a bully

   
     Should the cows rise up against their human overlords, and turn carnivorous in their rebellion, sating their hunger for vengeance on human flesh, I hope that, even if cornered by a bovine killing squads, as they close in around me, their long-lashed eyes brown and angry, their cud-flecked muzzles dripping foam, I still wouldn't, in the moment before their hooves come crashing down upon my head, blurt out something like, "How can you kill and eat an innocent living being!"
     Sigh.
     Because—I hate when I have to explain—people eat cows all the time. So if the cows turned the table and ate us, well, we wouldn't be happy about it, but we sure couldn't say it it wasn't fair, or condemn the act of eating other living entities. 
     Well, okay, we not only could say that, we would, because people are oblivious, and hypocrites. They're against all government handouts but their own. They discover the beauty of tolerance—for themselves—only after they're asked to accept someone they'd rather be kicking to death out behind the bar.
     Yesterday I wrote a fairly straightforward reaction to Bobby Jindal's execrable op-ed piece on why the religious notions of small businessmen should trump the basic civil rights of certain American citizens. I was more interested in why the battle should center on the statistically meaningless act of buying wedding cakes.
    Because really, wedding cakes? Wedding cakes! I had a big, hotel wedding. We ordered a big ass, multi-tiered cake. It was about the 20th most expensive thing related to the wedding. I'd hate to try to figure out the percentage of the American economy taken up by wedding cakes, but it would have a whole lot of zeros after the decimal point, somewhere between money spent on motorcycle sidecars and the market for fine bowler hats.
     The reaction was to be expected. But even with my lowered expectation, I noticed an extra strong dose of grievance. Religion, like meat-eaters, is so used to running our lives unquestioned, that even a tiny correction makes it feel that it is being pushed around. They  don't like it.
    "Bobby Jindal is correct that the gay militants are bullies," writes Albert Felker. He doesn't quite say why—I assume they're pushing people around by wanting to get married and have cake (the whole issue is a canard, like prayer in school. You are free to pray whenever you like, quietly, to yourself. But that isn't the big fucking me-me-me display that religion demands.. So hence the battle. Ditto for bakers. Being pressed to bake wedding cakes for gays is not actually a real life issue; this might be the first time that has actually been pointed out. A handful of occurrences, maybe. But really just a notional wedge dreamed up by the geniuses who brought us abstinence education).
     My favorite email from Monday, perhaps my favorite email of all time, came from Mike Zintak. It's sort of a greatest hits collection of the current thinking of the Far American Right, to stretch the term "thinking," and really needs no commentary. It is self-explanatory.
     Though, I can't resist pointing out his line about how gays "push their agenda down everyone's throat." That's what conjured up the cow revolt. Because really, look at religion. As with carnivores, faith had a lock on society. For centuries, millennia, the church had the whip hand. Wrong faith, they'd pack you in your synagogue and set it on fire. Women, well, God intended them to be scrubwomen and moms. Talk about pushing their agenda. 
     You can't expect them to see it. But that doesn't mean we can't look at it, blinking in wonder. A Mount Everest of hypocrisy.
     And then gays, after only a few decades of trying, get the chance to marry like normal human being do. And rather than give up that rather small shift--can't do that, can't give an inch—we get this insane stink over wedding cakes. (Mine came from House of Fine Chocolates, by the way, praised be its memory, a Broadway institution. They didn't give us any crap for being Jewish, which I didn't think to appreciate at the time).
     But enough commentary. You need to read this email. Because it is a Whitman Sampler of revanchist nuttery. Notice how he drags in Muslims at the end—the classic, wiggle your-fingers-over-your-sputtering-lips intellectual parry by the Tea Party, part of the ooo-we're-victims pathology, the daft notion that the Muslims "get" to do all these vile things, cutting people's heads off and such, without having as many liberal columnists point out that it's wrong, as if that's necessary. I call it "Terrorism Envy."
     He mentions "marching orders" twice—first capitalized, then not. He doesn't say where my orders are supposed to be from. Moscow—that's the traditional source. Or San Francisco. Anyway, for your reading enjoyment:

I find it interesting with those on the Left when they try to make a point against the Conservative line of view. You seem to follow the Marching Orders to the line with your article today. Comparing Gettysburg with the Gay movement. I would guess that you don't practice a "Religion", based on your dialog? Personally, I have no problem with a Gay or Lesbian life style...that is if their own choosing. I do how every have an issue when they (the gay movement), push their agenda down everyone's throat. There are a lot of Conservative Gays..that would agree with this...but you never mention those gay people...why? The fact that a gay couple can have a child defies logic. Yes they do adopt, but what does that do for the psychic of those children later into their life? Sure you agree that is not Normal? Many gay men and women would agree with that. Secondly, the whole aspect of "Gay Marriage", Marriage was set aside for a Man and a Women, for reproduction purposes....with Christian and Religious beliefs as stated in the Bible. And that includes the Muslim Faith. Funny though, how you don't detract the Muslim Faith about Gays....oh I forgot, within the Muslim Religion...they execute the gay people. Why have you not talked about that aspect? Must not be in your marching orders...huh?

What are you holding firm, Bobby?

     "Pick your battles," the saying goes. Which is odd, because more often than not, battles pick you. Actual hostilities break out for odd, non-strategic reasons that mock the deliberation implied by "pick." "Mere chance" is more like it.
     Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was in Pennsylvania in late June of 1863. He wanted to fight, hoping to inspire peace parties he imagined flourishing in the North. And the Union armies were looking for him.
     So there was going to be a battle, somewhere. Maybe at Chambersburg, or Harrisburg, or Cashtown.
     But an army needs shoes. So a unit of Southern troops was sent to forage for footwear at a nearby town, known for its tanneries and cobblers. And they found them, after a fashion. "Boots and saddles were there," Samuel Eliot Morison wryly notes. "on one brigade of General John Buford's cavalry division." So the great three-day battle erupted at Gettysburg and not down the road.
     In the same manner, someday historians will look back at America's epic social and legal struggle over gays joining society and wonder, "Why here?" Why did the forces of ossified religion, put to flight by much of modern life, turn and make a stand over whether a bakery must bake a frosted tower of sugar and flour—to channel Natalie Merchant—for any gay couple who walks through the door?
     Why here?
     That question bubbled up last week, while reading Louisian Gov. Bobby Jindal's op-ed in the Times, "I'm Holding Firm Against Gay Marriage" (Jindal must have written that headline himself. No Times copy editor would have dared.)
     Prejudice is about dehumanization. People of faith, to Jindal, are individuals: "a priest, minster or rabbi." They are "musicians, caterers, photographers and others should be immune from government coercion" Specific trades, like characters in a Richard Scarry story.
     And who is doing the coercing? They are "left-wing activists" "the radical left" "radical liberals" "left-wing ideologues who oppose religious freedom" "Hollywood and the media elite" Shady, faceless forces. Once, he does mention "gay men or lesbians." A typo perhaps.
     And what do these anonymous hordes do? They "bully," and "shriek" The idea that they might be regular folks too, individuals who, though gay, want to get married and have cake, and should be able to buy cake in a free society, well, that's not an issue to Jindal.
     "They will not deter me," he vows, standing like a stone wall, surveying the battlefield.
     Jindal uses the words "liberty" "freedom" or "free" 17 times, part of the right wing delusion that if the right buzzword is found, they'll fool people. Heck, it worked with abortion.
     As with many battles, the clash over balky bakers and phobic photographers was half luck, half opportunity. A weakness in the line of advancing rights. Hoteliers couldn't refuse to rent rooms to gay couples, since adultery is banned in the Bible too. They couldn't draw the line at baking birthday cakes for children of gay unions. That would recognize forming families is what marriage, gay or straight, is all about, and be too cruel, even for religious conservatives.
     This is a skirmish, a small battle in a losing war. They have to lose, since winning would unravel society. If a baker doesn't have to make a cake for a gay weddings, then the county clerk doesn't have to record the paperwork and the fire department doesn't have to keep the hall where one's scheduled from burning down. People whose faith keeps them from participating in the modern world should retire into enclaves, like the Amish.
     That won't happen. This is just the hidebound wheeling about and charging, again, before falling back to the next defensive line. A momentarily successful rally, like Pickett's Charge -- the last gasp of Confederate hopes at Gettsyburg. The Rebs breached the Union line at Cemetery Ridge. And then overpowering numbers of the boys in blue crushed them.      

     Whatever victories Republican revanchists win or lose, whatever the Supreme Court decides, they've already lost. History will continue to roll over them, past them, around them, and they'll be left only with bitter memories of their glorious lost cause.

The innocent beauty of the scam artist

     I have never been to Nigeria. But I imagine, beneath the poverty and the desperate scramble to scrape a living out of scarce resources, there is a certain sweetness there, which I can gleam even through its scam attempts to rob me via email.
     Now, I have no idea whether email scams are all from Nigeria, or even if most are. That's supposedly a center, but who knows? That's where I imagine them as originating, in windowless cinderblock warehouses with corrugated metal roofs, tapped out on cast-off computers by lanky, glassy-eyed teenagers, in tattered cast-off t-shirts that arrive in massive bundles in the holds of container ships. Particularly this one.

     I don't spend my days reading scam emails. Just hit "empty trash" and be done with it. , But I will scan my spam filter, though this one somehow slid around the filter and actually showed up in my "Inbox" a few Sundays ago. It reads, in its entirety: 

Dearest Friend,
How are you today, am sure you are doing well? I was wondering if I can know you better?
I am Colonel Marcus Luthan, of the U.S.Army presently working in Afghanistan. I saw your profile and sincerely wished to know you better and would like to have a good relationship with you..I have great plans for both of us, if you are interested please reply for more future communication and details. Also tell me more about yourself and your nationality
I will tell you more about my intentions when I receive your reply. Have a nice time and remain blessed. I will be happy to read from you, you can write me with my following email address: marcusslut@gmail.com , for more secured communication.
Thanks

      If I were teaching writing, I might save it for a lesson on "voice." Because the writing is not  so much incorrect, grammatically, as it is totally wrong in tone. No U.S. Army colonel could write three paragraphs like that if he tried for a day. 

      Even before you get to the give-away emails: marcusslut@gmail.com -- which is either "Marcus" misspelled, or with a middle initial, to make it look even more real, not knowing that it would scan, to an American eye, as "Marcus Slut" -- unless of course that reveals a side business, for days when nobody's biting on your email lures.

    Someone must fall for these scams -- you send out enough, and nibbles come in, and eventually money is being sent to you through Western Union or Paypal or Bitcoin or whatever the savvy scammer uses nowadays. The very aged, perhaps, or those whose greed far outstrips their intelligence. And I don't want to romanticize or apologize for them—real people are hurt, stripped of their savings, and the attempt reflects a desperate need that is neither sweet nor funny. 
    But the naïveté, the innocence of it, if you can be an innocent scam artist. It's almost beautiful.  I had to share it. I actually had to write him back, and see where it went, but the subsequent form letter attempts to extract more data from me didn't share the perfection of the original message. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     You know what I think has been tripping me up?
     The concept of fairness.
     A number of times I've look at the above photo and thought, "this'll stump 'em."
    And then, a qualm pops up its tiny little head and squeaks.
    That wouldn't be fair.
    Too hard. Too much of a challenge. 
    Which has stayed my hand.
    Until now.  
    Since nothing has proven too much of a challenge for you guys.
    So far.
    Today I'm saying, "Screw fairness." 
    I've been too nice.
    Which is why I always lose.
    Actually, I'm saying "fuck fairness."
    Which is what I said initially.
    A pleasing alliteration. 
    But then I yanked back.
    See? Nice. 
    No more.
    You know what Leo Durocher said about nice guys. 
    They finish last.
    Actually, he didn't say that.
    He said that nice guys finish in seventh place.
    Or nice guys don't win pennants.
    Or something negative about nice guys.  
    And it was transformed into the more famous line.
    Anyway, where is this orange-vested gentleman? Bonus points if you know what he's doing. 
     The winner—not that there will be a winner—will receive, should he win, which he won't, one of my super-exclusive 2015 blog posters.
     Good luck. Place your guesses below. 
     For all the good it'll do. 

How are the cameras changing us?

     After more than a century, the photograph still shocks.
     There is New York Mayor William Jay Gaynor, natty in his bowler hat and shiny shoes, the right lapel of his wool suit sprayed with blood. Urban planner Benjamin C. Marsh clutches his left arm and stares, in something like reproach, at the photographer, William Warnecke of the New York World, who snapped the shutter for what he thought would be an ordinary photo of a politician about to set sail for Europe and ended up with a picture of a man who had just been shot in the throat.
     The date was Aug. 9, 1910.
     Photography was past its infancy, but cameras were still bulky affairs often made of brass and wood and usually perched on tripods. News events such as this assassination — technically, though Gaynor lived three years until the bullet lodged in his throat killed him — were caught only by the merest happenstance. When the Hindenburg blew up before the newsreel cameras and radio microphones at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, the tragedy took on an epic scale and was seared into memory. Not because it was particularly deadly (36 people died in the zeppelin explosion — 13 passengers, 22 crew and a worker on the ground) but because it was so dramatic.
      Now we live in an era of cheap, high-quality, omnipresent video technology in the form of the camera built into every blessed cellphone. This permits us to see somebody shot every day, nearly, and another big fiery disaster or epic crash every, what, week or two? We are immediately moved by these images’ drama, only later puzzling over the true meaning of what we just saw.
     We’re also so busy processing each new crime and drama as it occurs, we never step back and wonder how having so much more life recorded is affecting us.
     Where are we going with this?
     Maybe it isn’t affecting us much. People still rob banks, still inadequately disguise themselves and get a bag of cash ready to explode into red dye despite seeing photos of the guy who tried it last week. Cops commit the most heinous over-reactions, not only caught by passersby, but in front of their own dashboard cameras that they know are there.
     Maybe they just don’t think. There’s a lot of that going around. You get the sense when a police officer puts 16 bullets into a suspect, he’s reacting to the situation in a way that, at that moment, feels right. It’s only later that they realize — and the world realizes, thanks to the damning video — what they’ve done.
      Or they don’t realize, lacking a video. One of the most worrisome risks from this spate of captured crimes is that, without damning images, the perpetrator easily walks as we saw this week with cop Dante Servin, a jaw-dropping case of justice shrugged away.
      Change comes fast and slow. For a long time, anyone who whipped out a phone and made a call in a public place was by definition a pretentious jerk. Now any given group of 7-year-olds furiously consult their phones and it’s strange to see one who isn’t. In some realms, the cellphone videos should affect our thinking but don’t. People still believe in UFOs, for instance, based on those blurry black-and-white photographs of pie pans, never for a moment wondering where are the phone videos we should have if these things were really here.
      Video cameras were an Orwellian intrusion that would be used by totalitarian regimes to restrict our rights. I’m sure some people still worry about that, failing to notice that, in practice, it is the evidence shot by cellphones that provides a bulwark against abused authority, security that we’ve lacked and obviously need. Maybe asking the police to wear body cameras is, again, giving them too much faith, putting too much responsibility into their hands. Maybe it’s us citizens who should wear the body cameras. For our own safety.