MORE ON THE HOMOPHOBIC MIND

From PBS' Frontline documentary site:

First of all, it has to do with what we fantasize that "being gay" means, which is to say, for men, being the passive receptor. To be gay inverts the gender order. In the public fantasy, in the homophobic mentality, to be gay is to be a man acting like a woman, or a woman acting like a man. One of the most common questions that straight people ask gay people is: "Which one of you is the boy, and which one of you is the girl?" It upsets the order of things. It throws the whole cosmos into chaos. You don't know who's the boy and who's the girl, and that's the only way we're able to see things.

. . . In a heterosexual relationship, you always have gender inequality, because you have a man and a woman, and they bring with them gender inequality. You can't get away from it. But a gay relationship actually makes gender equal. It neutralizes it. If there's going to be a power imbalance, it has to be based on something else. And it often is--on race, on size, on class, on all manner of things. But in the idea of a gay relationship is also the possibility of both being the penetrated and the penetrator, both the active and the passive. When people ask gay couples which one of you's the boy and which one of you's the girl, the most common answer is, "We both are," because you can move back and forth. And that really makes things confusing. . . .

Click here for the rest.

This is actually only one interview from the overall site devoted to the Frontline episode "Assault on Gay America." I haven't seen the documentary, myself, but I have seen some video clips on the site, and it looks pretty cool. Actually, there's lots of cool looking articles there, and I urge you to check it out. For instance, I found this:

Homophobia Questionnaire

For much of this century, homosexuality was defined by the medical and scientific community as a psychiatric disorder. In the last several decades, however, "homosexuality" has been removed from the diagnostic manual of disorders, and research emphasis has shifted to the other side of the problem: the study of the negative, sometimes pathological, reactions to homosexuals by heterosexuals.

The term "homophobia" has gained currency as a one-word summary of this widespread problem. Since the early 1980's, scientists attempting to measure homophobia have developed a number of different homophobia scales and questionnaires.

In 1996, as part of his study on homophobia, Dr. Henry Adams and his colleagues at the University of Georgia developed their own "Homophobia Scale" by modifying scales used by other researchers in earlier studies. It's a 25-item questionnaire "designed to measure your thoughts, feelings and behaviors with regards to homosexuality." The instructions stressed: "It is not a test, so there are no right or wrong answers."

Below, FRONTLINE has reproduced this "Wright, Adams, and Bernat Homophobia Scale." It is not a perfect measure of anti-gay feelings or ideas, and is not a predictor of potential for anti-gay violence. [Though this scale was used in a research project designed to test the theory that homophobia is a manifestation of repressed homosexual desire, the scale is not a measure of homosexuality.]

Do you secretly fear homosexuals? Take the test, here. I scored as a "high-grade non-homophobic." But then, I'm from the theater: gayness is quite fabulous there, and if you don't like it, that's just too F'ing bad.

What about YOU?

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MARKETS AND MORALITY

From Emphasis Added:

What’s been lost is a sense of civil virtue and recognition of the value of community. This is not by accident. It’s the result of a deliberate ideological campaign by free-market conservatives to undermine the social assumptions that lead to public policies such as corporate regulation, progressive taxation and redistributive government programs, which they oppose on principle. At some point, economic conservatives knew they would continue to lose these debates on political grounds so long as citizens felt that their rights and responsibilities as members of a community entitled them to set boundaries on individual and corporate behavior, and to appropriate a share of private wealth to provide for those at the bottom. The solution was to valorize individuals over communities – a common theme in libertarian-conservative ideology – and position the notion of the “free market” as some kind of abstract force of nature, rather than a human institution subject to human rules and in service to human goals.

That this has largely been accomplished is not a complete surprise. The free market has many benefits and has brought rising prosperity and the benefits of innovation to vastly improve quality of life in all kinds of ways. Government efforts to regulate its activities often have unintended consequences. The changes it forces on communities are often for the better. Occasionally, its internal self-correcting mechanisms work as intended. Defending it, therefore, is not an intellectually-disreputable position, or even necessarily an immoral one.

The problem is that to defend it down the line, you need to downplay a lot of human suffering and ignore a raft of indubitably negative social consequences.

Click here for the rest.

Well, well. What do you know? There actually is a morality to economics--of course, you wouldn't know this from reading your high school economics textbook. Essays like this need to be trumpeted loudly: for too long we've all been told that cutthroat neo-liberal philosophy is the only possible, workable vision for human existence. The guy who wrote this, Rob Salkowitz, does quite a good job of concisely verbalizing what seems to be so hard to get out during conversation with conservative know-it-alls; indeed, he uses much less column space than I did when I hit on the subject last year.

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Iraq Insurgency Larger Than Thought

From the Associated Press via Yahoo:

Contrary to U.S. government claims, the insurgency in Iraq is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not foreign fighters, and is far larger than previously thought, American military officials say.

The officials told The Associated Press the guerrillas can call on loyalists to boost their forces to as high as 20,000 and have enough popular support among nationalist Iraqis angered by the presence of U.S. troops that they cannot be militarily defeated.

That number is far larger than the 5,000 guerrillas previously thought to be at the insurgency's core. And some insurgents are highly specialized — one Baghdad cell, for instance, has two leaders, one assassin, and two groups of bomb-makers.

Although U.S. military analysts disagree over the exact size, the insurgency is believed to include dozens of regional cells, often led by tribal sheiks and inspired by Sunni Muslim imams.

The developing intelligence picture of the insurgency contrasts with the commonly stated view in the Bush administration that the fighting is fueled by foreign warriors intent on creating an Islamic state.

Click here.

We can't win this one, and it's immoral to even try. These insurgents see themselves as freedom fighters, for Christ's sake: they'll never give up as long the US is there. Time to pull out right now.

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THE NEW JIM CROW: SAME OLD STORY
Florida List for Purge of Voters Proves Flawed

From the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

Florida election officials used a flawed method to come up with a listing of people believed to be convicted felons, a list that they are recommending be used to purge voter registration rolls, state officials acknowledged yesterday. As a result, voters identifying themselves as Hispanic are almost completely absent from that list.

Of nearly 48,000 Florida residents on the felon list, only 61 are Hispanic. By contrast, more than 22,000 are African-American.

About 8 percent of Florida voters describe themselves as Hispanic, and about 11 percent as black.

In a presidential-election battleground state that decided the 2000 race by giving George W. Bush a margin of only 537 votes, the effect could be significant: black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, while Hispanics in Florida tend to vote Republican.

Elections officials of Florida's Republican administration denied any partisan motive in use of the method they adopted, and noted that it had been approved as part of a settlement of a civil rights lawsuit.

"This was absolutely unintentional," said Nicole de Lara, spokeswoman for the Florida secretary of state, Glenda E. Hood, an appointee of Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, the Bush apointee assures us it's unintentional; that's all according to script. They claimed it was unintentional back in 2000, too, and I guess it's just too damned bad that their little mistake gave their governor's brother the White House. Whatever, I don't buy that it was a mistake back then, and I certainly don't think it's a mistake now. They're trying to steal the election, again, and they may very well get away with it.

Bastards.

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IN THE NEWS
Two from Eschaton

First, a freshly dug up nugget, embedded in a Washington Post report from a couple of weeks ago on the White House under fire, about the destroyed microfilm containing records of Bush's National Guard service in the early 1970s:

White House Briefing: Testy, Testy, Testy

From the argument: "A significant controversy has arisen in the ongoing campaign over the President's military service during the Vietnam War, and specifically whether he performed his required days of service during a period between May 1972 and May 1973. Allegations have been made that the military personnel file for George W. Bush released to the press earlier this year is not complete. The public has an intense and legitimate interest in knowing the validity of these claims, which may well be answered by reviewing the microfilm copy of the personnel file in the Texas archives."

Associated Press Assistant General Counsel Dave Tomlin told me yesterday that AP reporters began trying to get the documents back in February, but hit roadblock after roadblock.

Tomlin said the AP has been informed that the microfilm in question does indeed exist. Tomlin said that because paper records can vanish and be tampered with, the microfilm "would erase any questions."

Click here for the rest (which deals with the overall ongoing criticism of the Bush administration; it's a good read).

So, as of June 25th, this microfilm supposedly existed, instead of being destroyed in the mid 90s as the Pentagon has asserted. Gosh! I don't know who to believe!

(I'm being sarcastic again.)

Next, from the London Guardian, some background that you may not have heard from the Senate Intelligence report blaming the CIA for the Iraqi WMD fiasco:

Iraq errors were CIA's fault, says Senate

"There were a number of situations where unreasonable conclusions were reached," Mr Chambliss told the Knight Ridder news agency. His office said yesterday he stood by his remarks, in which he argued the White House could not be blamed for believing intelligence it received from the CIA.

"I would say it's a total vindication of any allegations that might ever have been made about what the administration did with the information."

But the administration's critics yesterday described the report as incomplete. Carl Levin, a Democratic senator on the intelligence committee, said it was "only half the picture" because of the insistence by Republicans on the panel that examination of the White House's role be dealt with in a separate report, to be published after the election.

And

Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations in the CIA's counter-terrorist unit, said Mr Chambliss's conclusion was not supported by the facts. "People would have to forget an awful lot of history to make that wash. It ignores the fact that [the Bush administration] had already taken a strategic decision to go to war, before they asked for the intelligence."

He said repeated questioning of reports downplaying Iraq's arsenal and links with al-Qaida by Mr Cheney and other senior officials led to an atmosphere in which the CIA leadership and analysts "bent over backwards" to find evidence that conformed to the administration's views.

Click here for the rest.

The reality is that the White House, in spite of this Republican dominated Senate report, had been informed by the CIA on several occasions that there was not enough evidence to show that Iraq had WMDs, but that wasn't good enough for Bush and Dick. In addition to pressuring the CIA to produce the goods on Saddam Hussein, the Oval Office also established its own intelligence gathering services, which included the infamous Pentagon Office of Special Plans and other groups, for the express purpose of constructing a rationale for invading Iraq. At this point, such an observation is a matter of public record. I've even written about it here at Real Art, but at the moment I'm too lazy to dig through the archives to find it.

Maybe tomorrow.

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SUBVERTING RED DAWN
The Iraqi Insurgency

I watched the film Red Dawn (1984) last night on TNT. I was trying to get some reading done for a class I'm going to be teaching at LSU this fall for my assistantship duties, and had the TV on for some background noise. I really should have continued with my reading, but the movie sucked me in. You see, despite my anti-war rantings here at Real Art, I love a good war movie, and Red Dawn, even though its plot is built on an absurd premise, is a good war movie.

What makes it so good, primarily, is the acting: a bunch of A-list Brat Packers make up most of the cast. You won't find Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringworm, or Andrew "Wuss" McCarthy here, no sir, no whining about Saturday class in this picture. Instead we get to see Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, and Jennifer Grey mowing down lots of reds; this is a much better group of actors, if you ask me. There are also some pretty cool character actors involved such as Powers Boothe (a native Texan) and Harry Dean Stanton (you have no taste if you don't dig him). The actors are focused and efficient in their work, without much of the inwardly directed, isolated, heavy emoting that I railed away on in my Marlon Brando post a few days back.

In addition to the good acting, and more importantly, what makes the film so enjoyable for me is its hyper-patriotism. Red Dawn is one of the better cultural relics from the Reagan era, fighting the "evil empire" and all that. I put it into the same category as Rambo and Missing in Action; almost certainly, the film would be just as cheesy if not for the honesty and focus of the cast.

If you haven't seen it, here's a brief plot description. A series of unlikely global events robs the US of all allies, and the Soviets, Cubans, and Nicaraguans take advantage of the situation, knock out our nukes with a preemptive strike, and launch a conventional invasion through Mexico into Texas. (I told you that the plot is built on an absurd premise!) The movie's heroes are a group of rural teenagers in Colorado who manage to evade capture by Cuban paratroopers, hide out up in the mountains, and quickly become guerilla fighters against the communist occupation. In the end, most of them are killed, but the overall war is eventually won.

On the surface, the film reads as a very pro-American call to arms. That's exactly how I understood it back when I first saw it as a teenager, cheering on the heroes as they blew away commie pigs, feeling sad as each hero dies, well, a hero's death. Twenty years later, while an insurrection composed of young men kills American soldiers in Iraq, I saw the movie quite differently.

One can never be too terribly sure of exactly what a writer has in mind, but I'm tempted to say that, once one digs beneath the film's hyper-patriotism, Red Dawn makes some unequivocal anti-war statements. It is impossible to escape the film's sense of deep sadness. That is, not only is it sad to see each of the heroes knocked off one by one, to see civilians put to death as a counter-insurgency measure, to see these kids cry for their families and nation, but there are also moments when we see the sadness of the enemy. One subplot shows a Cuban colonel growing disillusioned by the mounting casualties among his troops, troubled by the fact that he is no longer a revolutionary; now he is an oppressor. There is also a telling moment when the Patrick Swayze character holds a gun to the face of a Russian soldier not much older than him: the helpless soldier looks back with fear and grief, and the moment lingers until it is cut short by Swayze pulling the trigger of his pistol. Furthermore, the film shows the heroes' torment and sadness about their own actions: they decide to execute a member of their group for helping the enemy; nobody really wants to kill him, but they do it anyway--all of them are tortured and haunted by their act of wartime justice. On the one hand, Red Dawn seems to say, "isn't it great that these kids are fighting and dying for their country?" On the other hand, it also seems to say, "isn't it terrible that these kids have to fight and die for their country?" I suppose I like art that contradicts itself.

Red Dawn also struck me in another way: if it is so wonderful for American youths to resist an occupation by foreign invaders, how can we despise the Iraqi insurgents? The film lays it all out--an illegal and preemptive invasion, bringing a new and wonderful form of government to the defeated nation, sleazy collaborators, killing those collaborators, strongarm "pacification" techniques used by the enemy, national humiliation, anger, torture, revenge. If you let the film do its propaganda work, it's hard not to hope that, given the same situation, you too would have the balls to pick up arms and resist. That's exactly what's happening in Iraq right now, and the numerous reports of low morale among US soldiers also echo Red Dawn. This time, we're the "evil empire" and the Iraqi resistance fighters are the patriots.

What a long strange trip it's been.

Red Dawn, in spite of its silly plot and goofy dialogue, is an enjoyable film, mostly because of the actors' dedicated work. However, in hindsight, the movie is much more sophisticated than it appears to be, contradicting its major pro-war and pro-American themes with elements of pacifism and a call for resistance to power and oppression. It's worth revisiting, if only for that. After all, as Michael Ventura of the Austin Chronicle once said, "there's no such thing as 'just a movie.'" Red Dawn is a prime example of that thought.

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Five U.S. soldiers die in attack

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Iraqi insurgents detonated a car bomb and then hammered a military headquarters in the city of Samarra with a mortar barrage Thursday, leveling the building and killing five U.S. soldiers and one Iraqi guardsman, the U.S. military said.

American troops -- backed by attack helicopters -- then fanned out through the city to hunt down the attackers in clashes that lasted into the late afternoon. Tanks deployed in the streets; smoke rose above a mosque.

The violence also killed three civilians, medical officials said. As many as 44 people were wounded, including 20 American soldiers and four Iraqi guardsmen, the military and hospital officials said.

Click here for more.

The insurgency continues, and it's my bet that it's going to continue for a long time to come. Clearly, the only way to end this is to withdraw all US troops now--at this point, only a peace-keeping force comprised of soldiers from Muslim nations under a UN mandate can do the job of restoring stability to Iraq. Why don't people understand this? The reason there is an insurgency is because invaders still occupy Iraq. This isn't rocket science: bring the boys back home.

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AWOL PRESIDENT? GUESS WE'LL NEVER KNOW
Pentagon: Bush record accidentally destroyed

From the New York Times via the Houston Chronicle:

Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

It said the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm.

No backup paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.

The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question.

Click here.

Destroyed, huh? What a wild coincidence! The records that could have shown that George W. Bush skipped out on several months of Air National Guard duty back in the early 1970s were accidentally destroyed. And by the Pentagon, no less! Truth really is stranger than fiction.

Of course, I'm being sarcastic.

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SPIDER-MAN MANIA

Mood music.

I haven't seen the new movie yet, but I plan to do so as soon as I can. Virtually every review I've read says it's better than the first one, which makes sense because as far as I can tell, the film riffs on an early comic book story from the 1960s wherein Peter Parker suffers a major crisis of confidence after getting his ass kicked by Doctor Octopus. Indeed, Peter's Charlie Brown-like self-doubt, his very real sense of humanity, is what makes Spider-Man so great. But don't just take my word for it.

From an essay by longtime Marvel Comics writer and editor Danny Fingeroth:

The superhero's shoes we'd gladly climb walls in

When I was editorial director of Marvel Comics' Spider-Man line, we used to refer to Spidey as "the regular guy" superhero. He really could be any one of us. To be Superman, you had to come from another planet. To be Wonder Woman you had to be born a mythological Amazon princess. But to be Spider-Man, you just had to be bitten by a radioactive spider. (Hey, it could happen.) You didn't have to be from a superhuman race. You just had to have it happen to you, and we all have things happen to us.

And when the spider gave Peter Parker his superpowers, he did what any of us would have done. He didn't go out and fight crime right away. He set out to make some money to help his kindly aunt and uncle, and also to have a few bucks to enjoy life. He was just a teenager. But when his uncle was murdered, things suddenly got a lot more serious. Peter captured the killer and realized that "with great power there must also come great responsibility." End of fun, time to be serious forever, right?

Wrong.

Because no matter how bad things became for Peter/Spidey, he always approached his responsibilities the way we all do — ambivalent and complaining all the way. Sure, he felt a responsibility to use his powers for good. He was brought up right. But he wanted to have fun — because, really, how could swinging through the canyons of New York not be fun? Sometimes he loved being Spider-Man, sometimes he hated it. Sometimes he turned his back on it for a while. But his sense of responsibility always brought him back.

Click here for the rest.

God, I'm such a big nerd! I read that phrase, "with great power there must also come great responsibility," and tear up a bit: I must have read a reprint of that first issue for the first time when I was in the fourth grade; Peter's lesson has stuck with me to this day. It's a shame that our President was too old to read comics back in the day. Perhaps he'd be less cavalier about his penchant for making war.

As an extra added bonus, I've gone through the RetroCRUSH archives and found for your pleasure a collection of early Spider-Man covers. Man, I love that weird, old Steve Ditko art:

SPIDER-MAN COVER GALLERY

When Spider-Man first appeared in 1963, it was something truly unique to comic books. While previously created heroes were chiseled near perfect specimens of virtue, Spidey was a geeky teenage twit, with girl problems, money problems, and more angst than you could shake a stick at. Though comic art god Jack Kirby designed the costume, (which you can see in the first picture in the top row), Lee needed a freakier approach, so he went with Steve Ditko. Ditko's trippy style suited Spidey perfectly, and his run on the first 38 issues of the book, are my favorite. So before you go and spend $8 on the new Sam Raimi film, pay tribute to the men who started it all by enjoying the wild and amazing collection of covers.

Click here for the gallery.

Here's my favorite of the bunch:





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What has right-wing America done to Christianity?

From the LA Weekly courtesy of BuzzFlash:

None of these people, however, refer much to anything Jesus actually said. In fact, they don’t seem to know what Jesus actually said. “Christ changed my heart,” says onetime presidential candidate Gary Bauer. “There is no king but Jesus,” declares John Ashcroft. “I’ve accepted Jesus as my personal savior,” says Bush. But no one ever says, “Well, you know, as Jesus Christ once said, ‘Whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.’” Or, “As it says in Matthew 6:2, ‘Don’t sound a trumpet when you give alms!’” Or, “In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says, ‘Do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again, and your reward shall be great.’” In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Bush’s speechwriters had him coin the phrase “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” a rough paraphrase of something Jesus said in Matthew 12:30. But the ninth chapter of Mark has it different: “Whoever is not against us,” Jesus assures His disciples, “is for us.”

Even Herobuilders’ Talking Jesus Action Figure, made by the Vicale Corporation in Danbury, Connecticut, can’t bring itself to utter anything so Christ-like as “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Pull the string 10 times, and you instead get the Ten Commandments, each of which were conveyed by Moses.

After combing through the Congressional Record, transcripts of television interviews, and magazine articles on the Bush administration and its faith-based politics, I’ve come to suspect that the Bush administration and its allies in the legislature have no real interest in Jesus. They’re quite happy to have fashioned a whole religion out of political expediency, and called it Christianity for the name recognition. They don’t quote the Bible because the words of Jesus are not useful to them.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, I'm of the opinion that Jesus was as far to the left as I am, more even, which is why I'm quite fond of Christ, but really getting to be annoyed by Christianity, especially fundamentalists. What was it that the Max von Sydow character said in Hannah and Her Sisters? "If Jesus Christ came back today and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up." Indeed.

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Bye-Bye, Bush Boom

From the New York Times via Common Dreams, Princeton economist Paul Krugman on the failure of Bush's efforts to revive the economy:

What about overall growth? After two and a half years of slow growth, real G.D.P. surged in the third quarter of 2003, growing at an annual rate of more than 8 percent. But that surge appears to have been another blip. In the first quarter of 2004, growth was down to 3.9 percent, only slightly above the Clinton-era average. Scattered signs of weakness — rising new claims for unemployment insurance, sales warnings at Target and Wal-Mart, falling numbers for new durable goods orders — have led many analysts to suspect that growth slowed further in the second quarter.

And economic growth is passing working Americans by. The average weekly earnings of nonsupervisory workers rose only 1.7 percent over the past year, lagging behind inflation. The president of Aetna, one of the biggest health insurers, recently told investors, "It's fair to say that a lot of the jobs being created may not be the jobs that come with benefits." Where is the growth going? No mystery: after-tax corporate profits as a share of G.D.P. have reached a level not seen since 1929.

What should we be doing differently? For three years many economists have argued that the most effective job-creating policies would be increased aid to state and local governments, extended unemployment insurance and tax rebates for lower- and middle-income families. The Bush administration paid no attention — it never even gave New York all the aid Mr. Bush promised after 9/11, and it allowed extended unemployment insurance to lapse. Instead, it focused on tax cuts for the affluent, ignoring warnings that these would do little to create jobs.

Click here for the rest.

The bottom line here is that tax cuts for the rich do not "trickle down" to the rest of us: neo-liberal economic philosophy is a sham. It is true that throwing money at the rich will create some short term overall economic gain, but it's a lot like maxing out your credit cards--party now, pay (dearly) later. Bush is setting up a situation with his tax cuts that will eventually put Congress in a position such that they have no choice but to cut important social services, and I'm not simply talking about the National Endowment for the Arts; I'm talking Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, programs that keep large segments of the population from dying in the streets. Of course, the rich, who are rapidly becoming the super-rich, don't have to worry about cuts in social services; after all, they're rich.

I wrote a somewhat lengthy post on the lies of neo-liberalism last summer. Here's an excerpt:

These long years of pro-business, pro-greed, anti-labor, anti-regulation rhetoric have slowly resulted in an overall degrading of consumers' ability to continue purchasing. The credit industry has managed to artificially extend consumer demand, but that cannot last. In other words, the hopes created by the short term economic gains of neo-liberal reforms have always been false: neo-liberal reforms, in the long run, bleed rank and file Americans dry; without masses of able consumers to create economic demand, the economy must collapse, as it is doing slowly now.

Neo-liberalism is like cocaine. It feels good for a time, but after a while, you’re willing to sell you own mother just to get a few more lines. Once you do, you quickly snort it all up. Feeling like shit when it’s gone, desperately craving more, you look for somebody else’s mother to sell.

Click here for more (and just ignore the lead excerpt on deflation, or read it if you like; the stuff on neo-liberalism is below that).

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Gay Persecution Rising Around the World

From Reuters via Common Dreams, a report on a new book chronicling worldwide homophobia:

The book, "Sex, Love and Homophobia," offers an overview of the experiences of gay, lesbian and transgender people around the world and gives a snapshot of their status in various societies today.

One British gay man interviewed describes how he was subjected to "aversion therapy" as a teenager in the 1960s because his mother could not accept her son was gay.

"I was locked up alone in a mental institution for 72 hours with supposedly gay pornography and given drugs to make me vomit and become incontinent," he said. "They said the next part of the treatment was to apply electrodes to my genitals. After three days I begged to be let out."

In the United States, Baird notes an increasing polarization of attitudes. "While San Francisco boasts the largest openly gay community of any city in the world, anti-homosexual movements in Kansas, Ohio and Colorado advocate as a 'Christian duty' the rejection, and in some cases even killing, of gay people."

"And this is not all just a small group of nutters in the mid-West," she told Reuters. "This kind of evangelism is growing, and unfortunately a substantial part of it is homophobic and says homosexuality is a sin or a disease."

Baird's book also focuses on countries where homosexuality is punishable by death -- Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Mauritania, Sudan, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Yemen and northern provinces of Nigeria.

Click here for the rest.

As a young Republican Southern Baptist fresh out of high school back in the mid 80s, I was rather homophobic myself. Then I changed my major to theater; it was sink or swim, and I learned to swim. After a few years of working, socializing, and eventually living with homosexuals, every pseudo-intellectualized reason I had to support my anti-gay views drifted away like so much smoke. There are no good reasons to hate or even dislike people for being gay. Sure, there are homosexuals I dislike, Andrew Sullivan for one, but that has nothing to do with sexual orientation.

Ultimately, homophobia, among straight men anyway, has much more to do with gender socialization than anything else. That is, men are not generally sexually objectified in our culture in the way that women are; because we still live in a highly patriarchial society, the potential for being objectified becomes an attack on a straight man's sense of power and control, which is tantamount to an attack on masculinity itself: gay men turn straight men's sense of identity completely upside down. Not understanding all the social and psychological elements coming into play, some straight guys freak out and develop fear or even hatred of gay men. Arguments about "God's will" or "nature" are bullshit--after all, homosexuality is simply one sin among many for Christians, and there are numerous examples of homosexuality found in nature.

It's goddamn sad that people don't think things through more clearly.

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Europe Reassesses US on Fourth of July

From the AP via Common Dreams:

The question across the Old Continent is not the oft-asked, "Why do they hate us?" In fact, not that many Europeans do. More thoughtful Americans ask, "Why have they lost respect for us?"

Iraq is the obvious short answer. In polls and conversations, a clear majority of Europeans excoriate President Bush for charging on alone into a widening quagmire that is reshaping the world around them.

And

"When Europeans look over at the roots they planted in America, they see root rot," said Barry Goodfield, an American psychotherapist and conflict specialist who has worked in Europe since 1972.

In each of these nations, citizens regard themselves as no less free than Americans, he said, with elections, an unfettered press and, in some cases, foreign policy experience dating back centuries.

"They have misgivings about our judgment, our motives, our implementation," he said by telephone from the Netherlands. "Democracy is ultimately about choice, and Europeans see choice being taken away."

By giving Europe a take-it-or-leave-it option on Iraq, Goodfield said, Bush insulted old allies at a deep level.

"We bypassed the U.N. and diplomacy, and they're reacting to a slap in the face," Goodfield concluded. "They see us as not playing by the rules, ignoring institutions that stand for justice and morality."

Click here for the rest.

A while back, while sitting in his schmantzy French chateau smoking his affected, home-rolled cigarettes, Johnny Depp compared the United States to a frightened, yapping, small dog. Leave it to the former 21 Jump Street star to find the brilliant metaphors. Personally, I think the better metaphor is the teenager who finally realizes that he can take his dad. Drunk on hormones, pubic hair, a new growth spurt, and car keys, the butthole teen thinks he knows everything just because he's started shaving: "screw you and your ways, old man, I'm going out and having some fun." Of course, in this metaphor, Europe is the dad.

In a very real sense, Europe is our "dad," the father of the American civilization. We're crazy to dismiss them the way we have. Sure, Europe is "old" as Bush has repeatedly pointed out, but with age comes wisdom: they know imperialism and fascism when they see it, and it's quite clear that they don't like at all what they're seeing here in America these days.

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MARY JANE MONDAY

From AlterNet, an article that both tracks the legalization movement's steady political gains throughout the country, and takes an in depth look at the weird situation in Oakland, California:

The Next Front in the Marijuana Battle

While the battle to allow marijuana for medical use is still being fought across the nation, the forward edge of the war for acceptance is pushing further: towards ending prohibition altogether. Campaigns to regulate rather than prohibit marijuana are catching fire around the country. The residents of Oakland, California – which already has legal medical marijuana dispensaries, will soon vote on whether to permit marijuana sales to all adults as a way to eliminate street dealing and fund city services.

On June 29, county officials qualified the Oakland Cannabis Initiative for the November election. Supporters of the initiative had turned in over 32,000 signatures. "It would require the City of Oakland to develop a system to tax and regulate adult sale and use of marijuana as soon as possible under state law," says Joe DeVries, a board member of the Oakland Civil Liberties Alliance, which supported the measure. "And until state law makes it possible, it requires that the Oakland police treat adult use and sale of marijuana as the lowest policing priority."

The Oakland Cannabis Initiative is one of several similar measures intended to show local support for statewide marijuana law reform legislation.

Far out, man.

Click here for the rest.

I do not advocate marijuana use. Smoking it presents all the dangers associated with smoking tobacco. As with alcohol, driving while high is quite dangerous, and chronic use also seems to sap motivation and cause laziness. However, I don't particularly oppose marijuana use either. You'll note that, even though pot is comparable to alcohol and tobacco in its harms, booze and cigs are very, very legal. Quite obviously, the reasons for ganja's prohibition status have much more to do with American political and cultural history (and, I might add, the big bucks that are made in the massive anti-drug industry) than they do with health, public safety, or morality. We're spending billions of dollars and ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens who are continuously swept up in the criminal justice system in order to keep the dastardly devil-weed illegal.

It's really a no-brainer: America should legalize marijuana right now. It's so simple, even a half-way intelligent conservative ought to realize it, and one, in fact, does.

From the Houston Chronicle, my favorite conservative, founder of the National Review, and converter of Ronald Reagan to the right wing, William F. Buckley Jr., on why pot should go above ground:

Penalties for marijuana use hard to defend

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.

The laws concerning marijuana aren't exactly indefensible, because practically nothing is, and the thunderers who tell us to stay the course can always find one man or woman who, having taken marijuana, moved on to severe mental disorder. But that argument, to quote myself, is on the order of saying that every rapist began by masturbating.

General rules based on individual victims are unwise. And although there is a perfectly respectable case against using marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend. If all our laws were paradigmatic, imagine what we would do to anyone caught lighting a cigarette, or drinking a beer. Or -- exulting in life in the paradigm -- committing adultery. Send them all to Guantanamo?

Legal practices should be informed by realities. These are enlightening in the matter of marijuana. There are approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests made very year. Most of these -- 87 percent -- involve nothing more than mere possession of small amounts of marijuana. This exercise in scrupulosity costs us $10 billion to $15 billion per year in direct expenditures alone.

Whoa, dude...wow.

Click here for the rest.

Sometimes I wonder if Buckley inhaled back in his college days; conservative as he is, he's much more cool than Bill Clinton ever was. Hmmm.

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REAL ART INDEPENDENCE DAY GRAB BAG

First, some retro Real Art from July 4, 2003:

REAL AMERICA

1976 was the year that I first developed a concept of what it means to be an American. I learned that we are the people of freedom. I learned that we are the people of justice. I learned that we are the people of democracy. I guess I’ve never really gotten over the glorification of the simple precepts for which our country supposedly stands. I still believe what I learned twenty-seven years ago: America is great because of its values.

Since then, it seems like so many of my countrymen have been trying to convince me that, even though we are, indeed, the people of freedom, justice, and democracy (God bless America, and all that, you know), these principles do not really mean what I originally believed them to mean:

“Oh yeah, we’re free, but those weirdos just can’t run around doing blah, blah, blah.”

“Well, I’m for justice, but we really can’t let all these criminals keep using their rights to yadda, yadda, yadda.”

“Sure, this is a democracy, but most people just don’t understand what’s best for the country, and blather, blather, blather.”

“I just don’t want to be killed by terrorists; I don’t want to die.”

Click here for the rest.

Next, a contemplative beat poem from the legendary Allen Ginsberg:

America

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.

Click here for the rest. Be sure to read with jazz and coffee.

Finally, courtesy of my old pal Matt, NPR's Morning Edition news crew recites the Declaration of Independence:

A Living Document

Sixteen years ago, Morning Edition launched what has become an Independence Day tradition: hosts, reporters, newscasters and commentators reading the Declaration of Independence.

The idea came from former Morning Edition director Sean Collins, who remembered seeing the Declaration and its "very powerful writing" printed on the front page of his grandmother's small-town newspaper. NPR staffers clamor to be included in the annual reading: "It's considered an honor," says Morning Edition Producer Barry Gordemer, who assembled audio clips of the 28 individuals reading. It's not an easy assignment: some words that sounded natural two centuries ago don't roll off the tongue today. The NPR staff is often reminded to resist the urge to edit Thomas Jefferson's original material.

The segment gets no special introduction on the air: "We wanted Jefferson's words to speak for themselves," Collins said. And the music behind the words — another NPR tradition — is "On the Threshold of Liberty" by Mark Isham.

Have I ever mentioned that Thomas Jefferson is my favorite founding father? No? Well, he is.

Click here for streaming audio of the recitation, complete with slide show of the NPR participants. Click here for the full text.

Happy Fourth of July!

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FAREWELL MARLON BRANDO

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Marlon Brando, who revolutionized American acting with his Method performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront and went on to create the iconic characterization of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather, has died. He was 80.

Brando died of lung failure Thursday evening at UCLA Medical Center, said Roxanne Moster, a spokeswoman for University of California, Los Angeles. She didn't give any details.

Brando, whose unpredictable behavior made him equally fascinating off the screen, was acclaimed the greatest actor of his generation, a two-time winner of the Academy Award who influenced some of the best actors of the generation that followed, among them Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson.

"He influenced more young actors of my generation than any actor," longtime friend and "Godfather" co-star James Caan said today through his publicist. "Anyone who denies this never understood what it was all about."

And

"I am myself," he once declared, "and if I have to hit my head against a brick wall to remain true to myself, I will do it."

Nothing could diminish his reputation as an actor of startling power and invention.

Starting with Kowalski in the stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire and a startling series of screen portrayals, Brando changed the nature of American acting.

Schooled at the Actors Studio in New York, he created a naturalism that was sometimes derided for its mumbling, grungy attitudes. But audiences were electrified, and a new generation of actors adopted his style.

Click here for the rest.

I didn't really get to see Brando until I was in my thirties. Sure, I saw him sleepwalking through Superman as an emotionally distant Jor-El, but it was only a few years ago that I finally got around to watching A Streetcar Named Desire and The Godfather. I'm sure that I would have loved these two landmark performances if I had seen them at any age, but being a grownup who had formally studied acting years earlier, I was able to marvel at his talent and skill in ways that I couldn't have as an inexperienced youngster. No doubt about it, Brando was great.

I tried to make a point of showing Streetcar to my acting students most of the years that I was a teacher when we studied the concept of emotional memory (which is, in short, an acting technique for when you're just not feeling it in a scene: you try to vividly remember a time in your own life when you felt the same way as your character--sometimes quite useful, but damned difficult to pull off for the uninitiated). There was the usual teenaged bitching about how lame black and white films are, but by the time the film was over, most students had to admit that Brando's Stanley Kowalski was mesmerizing. Brando's image overlooked my classroom for five years on a poster from The Wild One. I wanted my students to remember him. I wanted to remember him.

Brando's influence on American acting was inescapable. A slew of kickass actors who's careers started in the 1960s owe him everything. Pacino, Hoffman, DeNiro, and others are great, but not like Brando: he was the master of this "naturalistic" style of acting. Alas, Brando's influence was not nearly as longlasting as the man himself. Indeed, today television and film are populated with actors who are, when compared to Brando, like the shadows in Plato's cave allegory. That is, so many actors today seem to emulate Brando's style without his substance.

I see so many of my contemporaries who seemingly believe that it is enough to simply feel the feelings of their characters. Of course, real, honest emotion on stage or on screen can be a beautiful thing if utilized in the right way, but I grow tired of this cult of acting-as-therapy that serves as so much mental masturbation. Even Konstantin Stanislavski the great Russian acting teacher who invented emotion-based acting at the turn of the 20th century eventually figured that out. So many actors now seem to have, at least, an instinctive understanding of the importance of emotional honesty in acting, but forget that they are, in the most rudimentary sense, collaborative storytellers.

In other words, all the honest emotion in the world is absolutely useless without service to the overall story that a play or film is trying to tell. That's why Brando was so great: his emotions were real, but he took great care to sublimate all that feeling to the story; Brando studied his scripts in depth, just as his teacher Stella Adler had taught him to do. He had a keen awareness of the entirety of whatever play or film in which he was performing. (Quick aside: I heard his Godfather co-star, Robert Duval, state last night on Larry King that Brando hated his short time at the famous New York acting school, the Actors Studio, headed by acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who, according to many accounts, overemphasized emotional memory's role in acting; Brando greatly preferred Adler, who was more of a thinker. Nowdays, the face of the Actors Studio is the celebrity toady suck-up, James Lipton. Quite fitting, if you ask me.) Compare Brando, or Pacino, or DeNiro, to the standard, inwardly focused, overly emoting film actor...well, actually, there's no comparison to make, really. Brando's characters, when he wasn't simply out for the money, were part of a story--numerous professional actors today are up there all by themselves, lost in their private worlds of deep feeling.

Then there are the bimbos, pretty boys, standup comics, and rap stars, but I'd rather really not go there. They almost make me respect the emotionally masturbatory crowd. Almost. The Matrix is fun and all, but certainly not because of Keanu Reeves' stellar acting.

So farewell Marlon Brando. You helped create a relatively brief, shining moment in the four thousand year history of acting. I only wish your influence could have lasted longer.

Okay, I also wish that I had your talent.


Marlon Brando






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ANNOYANCES

While in Baton Rouge, I didn't really do much. Okay, we found a nice little house built in the late 1940s, originally as faculty housing, that doesn't seem to be in a beer-drenched, party-hardy, wild, frat-boy, date rape infested neighborhood. That's good. Other than that, we got rained on a lot, ate at a few restaurants, watched TV, and slept. Love them boudin balls...

Actually, there's a really cool seafood market a ways off from the LSU campus called Tony's. There's no in-house dining but they have a complete deli situation going: lots of kickass Cajun crawfish and whatnot, fried chicken, and, of course, boudin balls. If you're ever in Baton Rouge, you'd be missing out if you didn't go there.

Anyway, my laptop's interface is too weird, and I was enjoying the lazy, laid back aspect of Louisiana so I didn't do any blogging. Not that I even knew what was going on in the world--I stayed away from the news while I was there, and I'm happy (or sad) to report that everything still seems about the same without my scathing Real Art critiques on whatever I feel like critiquing. So I get home and learn that my computer won't restart, seemingly some sort of power of fuse issue. (Anybody got any suggestions? I'd hate to have to take my box in, but it's looking like that's the case.) Damn, these computers are worse than television; I've been feeling nervous without my eye on the world. So now, irony of ironies, I have no choice but to use my trusty laptop to commune with cyberspace. Fortunately, my old buddy Kevin had already configured the thing to plug into our home network, and I got it up and running on broadband without much of a problem. But the interface is still pretty weird, and it's annoyingly slower than my poor, sick superbox (sometimes called "GoatMage 2000").

Then I found out that one of my former students, a good friend actually, was in a car wreck and hurt pretty badly (okay, this is much more than a simple annoyance, but definitely in the big drag category). She's not in a coma or anything, but I still need to talk to her to find out how she's doing.

And Marlon Brando died. And we need to exterminate the damned roaches. And I still can't seem to get to bed any earlier than 7 in the morning.

What else? I have a headache.

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C'EST BON!

The wife and I are headed over to Baton Rouge for three or four days to find a place to live, so my blogging might slow down a wee bit for the next few days. However, I did get a laptop for my birthday a while back, and I've been aching to try it out on the road. I'll probably make at least one or two posts, but I'm looking at this house-hunting trip as the last real vacation I'll have for some years to come, so I'm not going to be writing any treatises or anything.

But, who knows? Maybe something wild will happen that just calls out for some therapeutic blogging on my part. Aaaah, I'll probably just talk about crawfish and gumbo...

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Cobb, Not Nader, is Green Pick

From the Nation:

After twice seeking the presidency as the nominee of the Green Party, and playing a critical role in building it into a force capable of delivering almost two-dozen state ballot lines and a nationwide infrastructure of volunteers, Ralph Nader turned his back on the party and announced earlier this year that he would mount an independent campaign for the nation's top job. As that campaign struggled to gain ballot lines and volunteer support, however, it began to look as if Nader could use the help of the Greens. Thus, with party delegates gathering here for Saturday's national convention vote on who to back for the presidency, Nader and his backers made what at times looked like a frantic attempt to secure the endorsement of the Greens.

On the eve of the convention, Nader selected a prominent Green, two-time California gubernatorial candidate Peter Camejo, as his vice presidential running mate. Though he did not make a formal bid for the party's nomination, he signaled that he wanted its endorsement. He expressed sympathy with the party platform. His backers flooded the convention hotel and hall with green-and-yellow "Nader/Camejo 2004" posters and, on the night before the presidential vote, Nader spoke by phone to a rally where the crowd chanted "Run Ralph Run."

It was too little, too late.

Click here for more.

I think that the Greens made a good move here. A political party needs to be about much more than a strong personality--just ask Ross Perot's rudderless Reform Party about that. While Nader did a great deal to bring the national spotlight down on the Green Party during his run in 2000, his weird, almost arrogant behavior as of late has shown that he is not as interested in building a viable party in the long term as he is in running for president, and more power to him--his issues are still, by and large, my issues, too, but I've pretty much come to the conclusion that one man cannot change the political system that exists now. Actually, I'm beginning to think that Nader is trying to shape the debate, rather than gain political power, and he may very well be having some success with that, at least within the Democratic Party.

This David Cobb guy sounds pretty cool. Of course, he won't win, but that's not really the point, either. His nomination shows that the Greens are going on without Nader's powerful personality, that they're getting out from under the temporary shadow that he cast: to me, the meaning of this is that the Greens are in it for the long haul. A few years from now when global warming has gotten so bad that even NASCAR fans are outraged with the corporate power establishment, and both the Democrats and the GOP are stuttering like idiots, the Green Party will be ready to sweep into power.

I hope.

Of course, I'm taking an Ambien, holding my nose, and voting for Kerry come November. I'll be living in Louisiana by then, and I think that state may very well be up for grabs; I'd never forgive myself if Bush won there by a small margin. If all goes well, I'll have plenty of vitriol here at Real Art to spew at conservative Kerry early in 2005. Really, his only plus is that he's not a talking chimp like Bush: he's going to screw up for sure, just not as badly W.

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IRAQ PUPPET REGIME BEGINS TODAY
U.S. transfers sovereignty to
Iraqi government ahead of schedule

From Reuters via the Houston Chronicle:

The U.S.-led coalition transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government today, speeding up the move by two days in an apparent bid to surprise insurgents who may have tried to sabotage the step toward self rule.

Legal documents handing over sovereignty were handed over by U.S. governor L. Paul Bremer to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in a ceremony in the heavily guarded Green Zone.

"This is a historical day," Allawi said during the ceremony. "We feel we are capable of controlling the security situation."

Click here for the rest.

And how do I know it's a puppet regime, you may ask? Two reasons. First, the US military is still in Iraq to provide "security," which is rather ironic because the only things that need to be secured, as far as I can tell, are the security-providing US military along with the White House's Iraqi puppets. In other words, this new government is a joke because Iraq is still occupied by its invaders. What the hell kind of sovreignty is it when it's at the end of a gun barrel?

Second, Bush has chosen a seasoned puppeteer to be America's new ambassador to this joke regime: John Negroponte long ago proved his worth as a stealth proconsul while he was ambassador to Honduras during President Reagan's bloodthirsty games in Central America during the first half of the 1980s. Negroponte was instrumental in training and directing the sadistic and far right-wing Contras in their US sponsored terrorist campaign against Nicaragua. He also was a big part of major human rights abuses in Honduras itself.

So long, Saddam: Iraqis, meet your new Saddam, John Negroponte! Get ready for a new round of torture that's going to make Abu Ghraib look like a cakewalk. Homosexual humiliation? That's kid stuff. Try cattle prods, razor blades, mutilation, and plain, old-fashioned murder on a massive scale.

Iraq's New Saddam: John Negroponte





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