Sunday, December 23, 2012
"Gay Press, Gay Power": anthology tells the story of gay media, and of coverage of LGBT people in mainstream media
Editor: Tracy Baim, with Foreword by John D’Emilio, many authors.
Title: “Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community
Newspapers in America”
Publication: Chicago: 2012; Prairie Avenue Publications and
Windy City Media Gorup, 468 pages, paper, heavily indexed, 39 chapters.
Amazon link is here.
I received this anthology as a sample, and found the early
chapters, about the way the mainstream media portrayed gay people in the days
before Stonewall the most interesting. I recall, on New Years Day, 1976, in New
York City, I met my first “trick” at the Ninth Circle, and his main theme was “the
abuse of the media”. I see what he
meant.
Why did people say and believe these things about people who
weren’t harming others? It’s partly
because others believed it. It’s hard to
shake bad habits of thought. But I think
that in those old days of McCarthyism and civilian government witchhunts (even
before the gay ones of “don’t ask don’t tell”) there was a feeling that
engaging in homosexual sex was a defiance of a “responsibility” to reproduce,
to have the same “full responsibilities of life” (Baim’s opening essay) as
everyone else. To not do so, at least in
McCarthyist thinking, made you the enemy.
D’Emilio, in his foreword, notes that the “infant gay press”
in early, pre-Internet days was vital for the community, that otherwise would
be bullied over by main media.
One of the most interesting essays is a history of the
Washington Blade by Lou Chibbaro, Jr. I
wasn’t aware that he had worked under a pseudonym when he joined the Blade in
the 1970s, to protect another job. I
also wasn’t aware of the street attacks on gay men in the 1990s, when I was
living in the DC area again – in the gays when Tracks, one of the greatest gay
clubs ever (with its volleyball court) was open, before real estate development
ran it over. Chibbaro describes the acquisition of the Blade and other gay
papers by Windows Media (with William Waybourn, whom I had known in Dallas in
the 1980s), and the bankruptcy of the company and sudden closing of the Blade,
it’s re-emergence as “DC Agenda” in 2009, and its reaquisition of its archives
and right to use its trademarked name soon.
Paul Schindler’s piece, “Gay City News”, covers the history
of the New York Native, the newspaper by Charles Ortleb, founded in 1980, which
carried so much detailed information on AIDS. In February 1986 I actually saw
the Native’s secure headquarters in SoHo.
I corresponded by mail with Ortleb a little by mail, but he didn’t seem
to like to be questioned. He published a
lot of material by Lawrence Mas and John Beldakas, much of it on conspiracy theories
("Exposing Mathilde Krim") and exploring ideas that AIDS could be exacerbated by
African Swine Fever Virus, an arbovirus studied at Plum Island on Long Island
by the USDA. However, had AIDS been
spread by mosquitoes, that would have fed right wing theories that AIDS, after
amplification by gay men, could eventually endanger the general
population. (Randy Shilts had covered
these fears in “And the Band Played On”). I used to say to Beldakas that Ortleb was paranoid, and Beldakas would say he has a right to be paranoid.
The history of the Dallas Voice is covered by David Webb,
along with the Dallas Gay Alliance, in the days of Bill Nelson and Terry
Tebedo, when I was living there.
Actually, Webb doesn’t cover the dangerous legislation that the Texas
legislature considered in 1983 which would have reinforced its sodomy law and
banned gays, military-style, from many civilian jobs like food handling and
teaching.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Rohit Bhargava's "Likeonomics": simplicity and passion count a lot more in business than just short term "profits"
Author: Rohit Bhargava
Title: “Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning
Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action”
Publication: 2012, John Wiley and Sons; ISBN 978-1-118-13753-6,
184 pages, indexed, Three Parts, plus forty pages in roman page numbers with
prologue, introduction, and author’s note.
First, let me get a technical matter off my chest (and I don’t
look like Bradley Cooper on “Ellen”). The book has forty(!) pages of introductory material with lower
case roman numerals for page numbers. That’s annoying. Better to number them starting with page 1 as
part of the real “Book”. An Introduction
is essentially a “Chapter 0”, the part of the movie before the opening
credits. I numbered only in integers
myself when I self-published “Do Ask Do Tell” in 1997, but when I converted to
Print on Demand with iUniverse in 2000, iUniverse renumbered my Introduction in
roman case. I don’t like that
practice. A book is as long “as it is”.
I picked up an autographed copy of the “orange” (hint: ING)
book at the Potomac Techwire “Social Media Outlook”, near Tyson’s Corner, VA. (The group had another session today on
venture capital, which I did not get to.) The author spoke at the session about social
media trends.
Part I of the book covers the “Modern Believability Crisis”. That’s right, most of us think that 90% of
the advertising we see on the web or in our inboxes is junk, and most of us don’t
want to hear from telemarketers. The
author introduces the idea that we like to do business (and support or promote)
people or associated companies that we “like”, and that much of what we “like”
is based on relatively distant, infrequent personal contacts, sometimes with
people in other cities. We often get
jobs through people we know “casually” but “like”. I can speak to that. After my own career layoff in 1971 (before
2001, that is) , I quickly got a federal government job through somebody I “knew”
through chess clubs. (I had won the majority of, but not all of, our
chess games.) I could say that knowing
something about the Sicilian Defense or Queen’s Gambit (or whether the “Marshall” is sound) could
help you get an unrelated job. It might.
Chess has a way of modeling life.
He also discounts the usual perceptions of networking. It’s not just about “elevator speeches” or
accumulating a count of “Likes” on Facebook or YouTube as if “likes” were the
new fiat currency to follow the Fiscal Cliff.
(The Federal Reserve won’t think so.)
The middle ("Part II") of the book gives the Five Principles of
Likeonomics. I think these are ideas that
would come out of Donald Trump’s show “The Apprentice”. (No, you don’t have to get your legs waxed to
“take one for the team.) But the most
successful companies have all followed these ideas, by breaking some of the
stereotyped expectations of quick short-tern earnings. Why did Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon
thrive after the dot-com bust in 2001, and why has Facebook done so well since
then? A particularly interesting concept
is his notion of unselfishness, which might better be described as “enlightened
self-interest”. I would give Ayn Rand
more credit than he does.
Bhargava gives some interesting stories of sudden
success. Early in the book, he explains
the viral success of Portuguese songwriter Ana Gomes Ferreira. His afterword “Story Book” ("Part III)" includes the small country of
Bhutan, the Green Bay Packers (as a
small market pro-football team away from any big city), “slow cooking” chef
Anupy Singla, and particularly Salman Khan and his Khan Academy. I personally
love Sal’s videos, such as his lively proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.
The author also discusses the success of ING Direct, as an
example of his “simplicity” concept.
Actually, ING Direct (“Orange”) was developed from ReliaStar Bank in St.
Cloud, MN when ING bought ReliaStar, where I was working in I.T., in 2000. I think that the “simplicity” idea needs to
be better applied in software products and gadgets, where companies overload
consumers with rarely used capabilities (and excessive automatic updates) that
can interfere with basic functionality.
I want to throw in one more idea. A lot of major companies really do need to do a much better job of customer service. As someone who works alone right now, I am very dependent on customer service to keep my infrastructure running. It isn't as robust and dependable as it needs to be.
Thursday, December 06, 2012
High school English for me was "grammar and literature"; Common Core standards could gut reading fiction in high school
I remember my first day of school in tenth grade, at
Washington-Lee High School, in 1958, fourth period, in English class, in a hot
third floor classroom, musty with the aroma of “good books”, and a fairly
good-looking ex-football player as a teacher, Mr. Davis.
English class then rotated between “grammar and literature”. The first major piece of literature we read was
Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”. I wish I
could remember the test questions (generally short answer or short essay); we
had to know “the eight parts of the theater” including the “proscenium doors”. I think there were exam questions about the
motives (and ironies thereof) in the characters like Antony and Brutus, and I
won’t get into that now. It was hard to
study for these tests. (When subbing, I
remember that a student teacher started out by talking about the cobbler.) Later, as a novel, we would read George
Elliot’s (pseudonymous) “Silas Marner” and I do remember that Silas had to get off his high
moral horse when the little girl Eppie appeared. (That was on the test, and Dr. Phil would be pleased today.) And we would read some short stories, which
we had to know “in detail”.
In “junior English” we would get a lot of Hawthorne (“The
Scarlet Letter” and “The House of Seven
Gables” and Poe. The female spinster
teacher actually liked horror. I would
write a handwritten term paper on James Fenimore Cooper’s treatment of women,
and have to read “The Deerslayer” (I remember the suspenseful early passages
about the ark across the forest lake) and “The Last of the Mohicans” (Daniel
Day-Lewis not at his best). In fact, “The
Pathfinder” was one of the first films I ever saw. I also read “The Spy” which I remember being
tedious (it wasn’t like 007). I’d have
to take the bus to the District of Columbia public library downtown (where the
Convention Center is now) to find everything. We also read “Tom Sawyer”. In history, we
read some literary non-fiction for in-class book reports, including JFK’s “Profiles
in Courage”, and the teacher grades us on whether he “learned anything new”
from the book report. I think I read
Lloyd C. Douglas’s “The Robe” that year.
Another English teacher was sponsor of the chess club. He also taught junior English, and said "I teach appreciation of literature". His tests looked harder than the ones I had.
Another English teacher was sponsor of the chess club. He also taught junior English, and said "I teach appreciation of literature". His tests looked harder than the ones I had.
In senior English, we had two fall term papers (one had to
be on a Shakespeare play, and I chose Hamlet, and the other could be on
anything – I wrote about composer Mahler and his influence on Schoenberg and
Berg). In class, we read both Macbeth
and King Lear. We read Thomas Hardy’s “The
Return of the Native” in class, and had to read one other Hardy novel (“The
Mayor of Casterbridge”). For book
reports, I also remember reading H. G. Wells’s philosophical “Meanwhile” (with
its discussions of stoics and epicureans), Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities" and Nevil Shute’s “In the Wet”. (Authors from the British Commonwealth were
OK.) The teacher (a Mr. :D.E." Gibbs) always said that "English literature is the better literature."
In French we read Victor Hugo and "Les Miserables" and also read one of the Dumas sequels to "Three Musketeers" (I think it was "The Iron in the Iron Mask"). Some time in high school I also read Thomas B. Costain's "The Moneyman" and loved it.
I can’t find the (Junior) Cooper term paper anywhere (I think it
might be in the attic), but I did find notes for a government class (senior)
term paper comparing US and USSR science education – twenty months before the
Cuban Missile Crisis and only a few months before the Berlin Wall crisis.
We would read “Huckleberry Finn” in freshman English in
college (at GWU in my case), before writing the term paper, the point of the
course. I remember a bizarre passage
about an old urban legend that (white) men with hairy arms and chests would get
rich (link). Maybe that would make a good Millionaire Question of the Day.
Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was all too new (but pertinent) when I was in high school, but I wonder what English teachers would have thought of "The Fountainhead" or her other books. Critics, remember, had been hard on her at first.
Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was all too new (but pertinent) when I was in high school, but I wonder what English teachers would have thought of "The Fountainhead" or her other books. Critics, remember, had been hard on her at first.
There’s controversy now, as the Common Core State Standards
in Englsh would replace a lot of fiction assignments with “information-rich
non-fiction”. I think my first “Do Ask
Do Tell” book fits into that category!
The Washington Post has a front page story (“Common core sparks war over words”) on the
matter by Lyndsey Layton on Monday, December 3, 2012, here.
When I subbed, most students had to read Elie Wiesel’s “Night”
(abridged) and Golding’s “The Lord of
the Flies”. A chum had read that my
senior year in high school (it’s English). Another favorite (especially of mine) is Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird". Teachers would give daily “reading quizzes”, which could be rather
detailed (like "video worksheets" on films), on the assigned chapters.
Making up a reading quiz is a good way for a novelist to check all the
loose ends in a novel manuscript. I got
the hang of it.
I remember another chum in college days who once said (at a
summer job), “What we need is to go back to the classics.”
Sunday, December 02, 2012
Eberstadt (and others): "A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic"
Author: Nicholas Eberstadt, with responses by William A.
Galston and Yuval Levin
Title: “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic”
Publication: Templeton Press, 2012, 978-1-59947-435-9, 134 pages,
paper
This booklet is part of a series called the “New Threats to
Freedom” series and it offers an “opposing viewpoints” technique I’ve discussed
here before (September 19, 2006).
The book comprises a long primary essay by Eberstadt, “America’s
Growing Dependency on Government Entitlements: The Rise of Entitlement s in
Modern America, 1960-2010”, with many detailed illustrative graphs, followed by
“Dissenting Points of View” by William A. Galston (“Have We Become a ‘Nation of Takers’”, and
Yural Levin (“Civil Society and the
Entitlement State”), followed by an Epilogue, a “Response to Galston and Levin”.
When I hear the word “taker”, I think of Ayn Rand’s notion
of “second-hander” in her novel “The Fountainhead”. And it is true that America depends on
welfare benefits administered by governments (states and federal) much more
today than it did generations ago, when families had to take care of their own. I can remember being annoyed in convenience stores
when people in front take so much time using food stamps. That sounds hard-hearted, but could only be
answered if more people were willing to support others directly, in and outside
the family, and not just their own children.
I do have to agree with Galston and disagree with Eberstadt
to the extinct that he considers practically all benefit programs “entitlements”. Eberstadt views Social Security retirement as
a Ponzi scheme, predicated on future sacrifices of the unborn (even
unconceived).
Most social security retirement beneficiaries receive a
benefit actuarially related to what they (and their employers or spouses)
contributed over the years with the FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act)
Tax, which began in the 1930s. It is
true that the first beneficiaries had contributed no premiums, so logically the
government is always paying benefits of current retirees from current taxes in
informal return to pay the worker an actuarially fair annuity benefit upon that
worker’s retirement in the future. It is
acceptable to delay retirement age or reduce benefits as the lifespans
increase.
There is controversy over whether FICA is really a “tax”,
because the Supreme Court has actually ruled (in Fleming v. Nestor (1960)) that
no one has an “accrued property right” based on FICA or self-employment
taxes. In practice, for most people, the
collection has been tied to a future benefit, an observation which may negate
some of its regressivity and may counter the idea that it is a welfare “entitlement”
that should be means tested.
The practical problem is that, not only are life spans
increasing, but workers are having fewer children, so the number of people from
whom a tax must be collected to pay a certain level of benefits decreases. This has sometimes been called the “demographic
winter” problem. Galston points out
that a well-constructed retirement “annuity” would not itself provide “moral
hazard” problems that discourage work and self-reliance, but demographic
changes, as well as gender-related issues, might. In his reply, Eberstadt points out that the
use of means-tested entitlements by people with reasonable incomes has
increased over the decades.
The Mike Huckabee Show interviews Eberstadt:
This little book is critical for the Fiscal Cliff debate.
Labels:
Eberstadt,
financial stability,
opposing viewpoints
Monday, November 26, 2012
Timothy Kurek: "The Cross in the Closet": "Gay like me?"
Author: Timothy Kurek
Title: “The Cross in the Closet: One man’s abominable quest
to find Jesus in the margins”
Publication: Blue Head Publishing, ISBN 978-0-9835677-4-5,
331 pages, paper, 4 parts, 35 chapters
Amazon link is here.
Readers may know the 1961 book (and 1964 film) “Black Like Me” by John Howard
Griffin, in which the protagonist used certain medications and an ultraviolet
lamp to look black for a social experiment. Former Naval Academy midshipman had
mentioned this book in his own “Honor Bound” in 1992 (Oct. 10, 2007 on this
blog). I’ve just added the film to my
Netflix queue. Will Kurek’s book become a film, too?
Kurek, raised in a fundamentalist church in Tennessee,
decided to conduct his experiment after a lesbian friend was thrown out of her
family. For a whole calendar year, he
went undercover and lived as an “open” gay young man. Of course, he didn’t have to change his body
(although he did try a little light drag once).
He got to know the bar scene around a place in Nashville
called “The Tribe” (an ironic name). He traveled to New York to join a protest
against the Vatican for refusing to support a UN measure to stop anti-gay
legislation in the “third world” (that is, in countries like Uganda). He worked for a gay coffee house, which closed
late in his year and he really feared its change to “family” ownership. He even traveled to Topeka, Kansas, to try to
“interview” staff at the Westboro Baptist Church, which he depicts as having
bragged about its hatred. Kurek also notes how churches and conservative groups raise money and lobby to take away gay people's rights. He admits that one time as a teen working in a fast-food restaurant he pressured a gay manager who accidentally brushed against him at work. Those kinds of accusations are all too easy.
He also discovered a layer to love that he didn’t know
existed, as he built friendships with some of the men in the community. I found
particularly interesting his account of the gay softball league. In 1984, I played in one such league in
Dallas, where a team could forfeit a game if it had “too many straights”. I remember the Smith brothers, the quiet
younger gay one being an accomplished tennis player, and the older extroverted straight
one showing up at the Dallas TMC bar and saying one time “Hairy chests are for
sissies”. I wasn’t good enough to play
on the team regularly (I couldn’t compete with “Thunderbuns”), although I
remember an opposite field single (hard to do in slow pitch) in a 13-9 win for
JR’s, and a real opposite field home run (over the wall) in a practice
game. And I remember an 18-inning
women’s game that ended 4-3. Good slow
pitch can be very difficult to hit. I
also remember a bar softball league in NYC in 1978 where I played for Boots ‘n’
Saddle (on Pride Day) and got a
bases-loaded single to keep a rally alive in a 13-4 win in a field on Leroy
Street. The fence was so close that
clearing it was only a double. (For
those who remember, 1978 in NYC was the Year of Bucky Dent.)
Since the 1990s, the thrust in the “gay rights movement” has
focused on equality: in opportunity, benefits, responsibility, and sharing
risk. But back in the 1950s, when the
Mattachine formed, it was all about simply being left alone. Visitors to my blogs know my own story (from
my “Do Ask Do Tell” first book in 1997) about my “expulsion” from William and
Mary for telling the Dean of Men (under pressure) that I was gay.
Why did these things happen?
It has seemed like a brutal twist that it was more offensive or
traumatic to the community to say that you were gay (or be “found out”) and
presumably disinterested in having children at all, than to get a girl pregnant
by “mistake”. Moral standards seemed to
have contradictions, or what I call “wind shifts” like those that
accompany cold fronts. Sometimes the spun in circular reasoning like
tornadoes.
Of course, the book attributes most of this to
“fundamentalist religion”. It is
certainly true that people turn to “authorized” interpretations of “scripture”
when they can’ resolve seeming moral contradictions by science and intellect
alone. This leads to authoritarian social structures (often abused) and
intellectual childishness. But it’s
important to look even beyond “teachings of the Church” to see what could drive
them.
One good starting point for grasping this is to look at the
Biblical idea of not placing too much stock on your own material situation on
Earth. In short, bad things happen to
good people. Families and many communities need to maintain a lot of social cohesion
or “social capital”, just to survive and have a future. In such a culture, any challenge to the
importance of having children and proving the optimum environment for them
(mother and dad, married) is not tolerated. Given sustainability problems today, these
ideas could return. There was also the myth
that homosexuality undermines the ability of men to fight collectively to
protect women and children in a community, an idea that some people tried to leverage
in the 90s with the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy for gays in the military,
although sometimes it sounded like “do ask, if necessary”. One of
Kurek’s anecdotes involves a Marine tossed out under DADT. In the 1980s, when AIDS surfaced, the
religious right tried to add hyrdrocarbons to homophobia by raise the idea of
an indirect threat to general public health (the “amplification and chain
letter” argument, which fizzled out with time. )
There is, also, the “windshift”. Once people say that scripture says that a
person has a particular life issue because of “sin”, other people are
confronted with the “love the sinner” paradox.
It’s a lot easier to hate the sinner to get out of this discomfort. There’s another paradox that older
homosexuals remember, at least those who were not physically competitive like
me (and that was more of an issue in the 1950s than it is today). I was told I was unfit, but suddenly people
changed windage and wanted to see me married and making babies to carry on the
family anyway (I’m an only child).
In the long run, this has been an issue where “reproduction
rules” until people get smart about the rules of engagement, which often invoke the idea, "If I have to play by these rules, so do you." It’s a sort of psychological communism.
Wikipedia attribution link for picture of downtown
Nashville.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Alternative book formats for the disabled raise copyright issues; Amazon as a publisher
Carolina Rossini has an article at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation regarding the proposal to change an international treaty regarding
copyrights to give the blind, visually impaired or with print disabilities more
rights in accessing other versions of conventionally published books.
Alan Adler speaks for the Association of American Publishers (AAP),
which is resistant to the idea of corporate publishers giving up any ownership
rights in a manner that sets a precedent for situations for which publishers
already have well established practices.
The link for the EFF story is here.
The story is provocative for me for another reason. In 1997, when I self-published my first “Do
Ask Do Tell” book with 350 copies from a book manufacturer in Gaithersburg, MD,
I remember the issue of controlling costs.
There was no way I could have presented my book in a variety of other
formats, such as large print, braille, or audio tape, had that been
expected.
With print on demand, such possibilities may emerge as
practical capabilities of print-on-demand companies, which, so far, have many
been interested in e-book alternatives, particularly for the Amazon
Kindle. In fact, some small, mainly
self-published, books have been available by Kindle only.
On that issue, I still like to have a hard-copy of a book if
possible. I like to have something I can
use even if the power is out or there is no Internet connection (although you
don’t need one once you download the book) – even on a camping trip, even in
the Third World some day. Yet Amazon
says that sale of Kindle are booming in comparison to hard-copy. I see Kindles on the Metro (that is, either in
Washington DC or the NYC Transit System) all the time, and on the Amtrak train
and plane. (Yes, I’ve been to the Big Apple a lot in the past year.) Amazon has created a flap by becoming a “publisher”
itself, as in this Wall Street journal story Oct. 17 by Jeffrey A.
Trachtenberg, link here.
Barnes and Noble was unwilling to stock
Amazon titles in its stores – not even right next to my favorite Landmark
Theater.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
National Academy of Sciences releases booklet on the risk of "smaller" terrorist attacks on the power grid
The National Academy of Sciences (National Research Council)
has released a new report, “Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System”,
when can be downloaded for free as a “guest” at tha NAS site. A purchase of a hardcopy for $49 is
requested. The ISNB is “0-309-11404-7”. The
book runs 165 pages.
The report, which includes work back to 2007, stresses that
terrorists could cause extreme, long-lasting disruptions in the power grid with
conventional attacks on substations possibly from rockets fired from publicly
accessible areas near the properties.
All power stations are on secured, heavily guarded private
property. Some have visitor’s centers
(for example, Dominion Power’s visitor center for a nuclear station NW of
Richmond is quite informative), and some are near highly traveled interstates
with nearby parking areas.
Previous reports on vulnerability of power grids have
focused on the possibility of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack from high
altitude, only mentioned here in the appendix.
There has also been attention to the possibility of widespread damage
from coronal mass ejections from solar geomagnetic storms, which has generally
considered much more likely. Newt Gingrich, in particular, called attention to
these vulnerabilities with an op-ed after last summer’s derecho. However, this report shows that much smaller
attacks could cause huge disruptions.
Conventional attacks could not affect home electronics and cars, but
localized microwave-based EMP effects (as in the movie “Oceans 11”) are
conceivable.
According to the new
report, one of the biggest problems would come from replacing specialized large
transformers that step up and down electricity. Most are imported from overseas
and are so large that they are difficult to transport quickly.
There was an exercise in March 2012 transporting a specially
designed transformer from St. Louis to Houston after a mock hurricane.
Deregulation of the power industry into components that
generate and then distribute power has led to security vulnerabilities, the
report says.
The report also suggests decentralizing some critical power
infrastructure and loosening technical interdependencies within the grid, and
putting more infrastructure underground, which the NAS believes could be done
more efficiently than has been the case in the past.
It appears that the online version of the report may be enhanced once there has been a security classification review.
See a review of an earlier NAS report on solar storms here Aug. 9.
The New York Times discusses the report in an article by
Matthew L. Wald on p. A23 of Wednesday, November 15, 2012 paper. I’ll cover
this more soon on the Issues blog.
Labels:
cyber security,
electromagnetic pulse,
NAS reports
Monday, November 05, 2012
O.S. Guinness: book on "sustainable freedom"
Author: O.S. Guinness
Title: “A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the
American Future”
Publication: 2012, IVP Books, ISBN 978-8308-3465-5, 224
pages, indexed, 7 Chapters
“Sustainability” has not always been a moral buzzword. The early Christians expected the “end” to
come soon. In most of the twentieth
century (and previous centuries) the welfare of a country and all its
constituent social groupings had a lot to do with surviving external threats
from enemies and with throwing off political tyranny and authoritarianism,
migrating toward liberal democracy with increasing recognition of diversity and
individual rights.
In recent years, we have indeed started to question how we
can sustain our western lifestyles, not just against competitive enemies (like
radical Islam) but from climate change and “demographic winter”.
Guinness generally keeps his reasoning high-level and
abstract, as if he were proving a sequence of theorems about political or
social science. He starts out by
focusing on “the American experiment” (not to confuse this term with the name
of a conservative group in Minneapolis), comparing America to other great
empires, and the American revolution to other traumatic changes in
history.
He comes up with a nice idea of a “triangle” of
sustainability: Freedom requires
virtue, which in turn requires faith, which in turn requires freedom, closing
the triangle. The problem is that virtue
cannot be derived purely by intellect alone, because some moral issues –
especially those having to do with the relationship of the “special” individual
to the group – tend to lead us into contradictions. For example, it seems good to like or prefer
people who seem “virtuous” (or who “look” virtuous), but then we are putting
down the less fortunate. (Perhaps that
means, if I was lifted up, I owe it to “society” (or God) to lift someone else
up.) We tend to resolve these moral
conundrums by looking for absolute moral
teachings in scripture (for example, the way the Vatican interprets scripture
as “the Teachings of the Church”). The scriptures play umpire, defining the size
of the pitcher’s strike zone. But
no one can really experience faith until
he or she is free to do so without external pressure from the external,
paternalistic state. And that brings us
into some paradox concerning what “freedom” at the individual level must mean
if it is to remain sustainable.
Guinness defines a concept called “negative freedom”, that is,
the insistence on being left alone (mentioned in a couple of famous Supreme Court opinions). We
need to let ourselves be bothered with other people’s needs because our own
output in life means nothing except in its ability to meet the real needs of
other people (although “real life” can become quite broadly construed, despite
my own late mother’s ideas about this.) Guinness decries the weakening not only
of marriage but of most social structures.
He says that real freedom is the province only of those who “belong” to
others and to purposes larger than themselves.
I always have a problem with the idea of belonging to
someone else’s purpose, because you could wind up playing on the wrong
team. Who wants to “belong” to a crime
family, however pious? Individualism is indeed a good check on corrupt
leadership. People who are “different”
but talented find themselves in a precarious position in these kinds of
revolutionary debates; the asymmetry of their efforts can topple things over
back toward exclusion of others who are even less talented and maybe to certain
kinds of authoritarianism (even fascism).
In an individualistic culture, people are supposed to take care of
themselves and “mind their own business”;
but it is still necessary to learn how to be attentive to others and
take care of others, at least in a family setting, and this responsibility is
inherent and occurs long before any decision to have children. Indeed, the whole meaning of marriage becomes
something that ratifies one’s ability to channel his deepest sense of
satisfaction and purpose toward real needs around; but marriage doesn’t cause
it. It becomes a chicken and egg
problem, or another endless loop, a moral spin or low pressure system.
Guinness never mentions homosexuality or gay political issues, but he does criticize the notion that sexuality is (or has become in western society) a private, self-serving experience rather than part of the process of socialization. He seems to think that deference to scriptural notions of right and wrong are necessary to get around apparent surface contradictions. He sees libertarianism as "selfish", but that's also how he sees the self-serving behavior of much of American business. Freedom, he thinks, more about doing the right things out of "habits of the heart", for the good of everyone (including other generations), in concentric rings around immediate family.
The book implies that the willingness of people who are "different" (me) to become other-centric, and not too invested in their own chosen purposes, can become critical for the sustainability of a whole free society.
Guinness never mentions homosexuality or gay political issues, but he does criticize the notion that sexuality is (or has become in western society) a private, self-serving experience rather than part of the process of socialization. He seems to think that deference to scriptural notions of right and wrong are necessary to get around apparent surface contradictions. He sees libertarianism as "selfish", but that's also how he sees the self-serving behavior of much of American business. Freedom, he thinks, more about doing the right things out of "habits of the heart", for the good of everyone (including other generations), in concentric rings around immediate family.
The book implies that the willingness of people who are "different" (me) to become other-centric, and not too invested in their own chosen purposes, can become critical for the sustainability of a whole free society.
Amazon link is here.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Bob Woodward: "The Price of Politics" and partisanship
Author: Bob Woodward
Title: “The Price of Politics”
Publication: 2012, Simon & Schuster, ISBN
978-1-4516-5110-2, 428 pages, hardcover, 40 chapters, indexed.
Maybe it takes long memories now to recall the bitter debt
ceiling debate during the summer of 2011. During that time, it appeared, at
least to the casual blogger, that “Tea Party” Republican congressmen and (to a
lesser extent) Senators were willing to torch the entire American economy to
prove an ideological point: that taxes on profitable businesses or individuals
not be raised to pay for the needs of others.
This was a job for “families.” For his part, President Obama may have
added some additional fuel to the fire by some intransigent veto threats,
because he rightfully didn’t want to face a debt ceiling crisis every six
months.
Woodward does indeed, around p. 327, describe the potential
for financial apocalypse were default to occur and not be remedied
quickly. I had covered this on my “Issues”
blog in July 2011. In the worst
scenario, cash itself could have become worthless and ordinary savings could be
wiped out, according to some sources in the book. Maybe that what extremists want, a righteous (or right wing) revolution.
There was a lot of hype that summer on “entitlements”, and
sometimes speakers forgot that Social Security benefits are related,
substantially but not absolutely, to FICA tax contributions by former workers
and their spouses. They are essentially
annuities that have been earned. Were
current beneficiaries really to be stiffed?
Yet, Woodward mentions the possibility of means testing at least for
some high income (or high net worth?) persons already on some means testing (I
wasn’t sure that happens now, I’ll have to check).
The style of the book is a bit perfunctory, with lots of
short paragraphs and detailed narratives of all the meetings and exchanges of
the debate, including the famous Friday afternoon breakdown between Boehner and
Obama.
In the last chapter, Woodward presents his views on the
leadership failures of both Boehner and Obama.
Call this book, “The Price of Partisan Politics”.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
National Archives Foundation has glossy book on Cuban Missile Crisis
Authors: Stacey Bredhoff, with message by David S. Ferriero (Archivist of the United States)
Title: “To the Brink: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis”
Publication: 2012, The Foundation for the National Archives,
Washington DC, ISBN 978-0-9841033-9-6, 90 pages, full sized, gloss, paperback,
very heavily illustrated, sold at the Gift Shop at the Archives in Washington
DC for $19.95.
The book contains illustrations based on the exhibits at the
Archives, where no photography is permitted.
All the major intelligence memos, conversation transcripts, and CIA
assessments are included. There are
multiple photographs of the sites in Cuba and even of a model fallout shelter.
The Administration had been concerned about possible Soviet
activity in Cuba ever since Kennedy took office and the Bay of Pigs failed. It had called up Army reservists in September
1962 for a year of active duty. It’s a
little surprising that it took until Oct. 16 for the first official evidence of
Soviet missiles to reach the president.
Mrs. Kennedy was in Middleburg, VA on Oct. 16 and rejoined JFK on that
day, six days before the crisis was made public by Kennedy’s famous speech
Monday evening Oct. 22.
The booklet also contains photographs of CIA assessments of
the personalities of Castro and of Khrushchev. The CIA was particularly concerned about
Castro’s egotism, narcissism and even the nihilism known in today’s terrorists. That personality pathology certainly
contributed to the bellicose nature of Castro’s behavior. Castro had assumed that the US would invade
Cuba immediately, but was willing to see Cuba sacrificed to see capitalism
obliterated in nuclear war. Castro
seemed to want the end to come out of spite. Khrushchev had badly miscalculated that the US
could tolerate the presence of missiles in Cuba, since the Soviets had “tolerated”
the outdated missiles in Turkey.
The booklet has a picture of the DEFCON-3 elevation telegram
on Oct. 23.
Here is a CSPAN video on the tapes that Kennedy made of the
conversations.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, California energy company have paper on the danger of solar geomagnetic storms
Oak Ridge National Laboratory has an important PDF booklet
(198 pages), “Geomagnetic Storms and Their Impact on the U.S. Power Grid”, by
John Kappenman, with (free) PDF link here.
Although the booklet is on the ORNL website, the author
comes from Metatech corporation in Goletaa. CA (near Santa Barbara, ironically
mentioned in another book review recently on
Sept. 19). The link for that
company is here.
The booklet is even more detailed than a similar paper by
the National Academy of Sciences reviewed here Aug. 9, 2012. It comprises four
major chapters: (1) Overview (2) Details
of the 1989 geomagnetic storm that caused major power failures centered in
Quebec (3) Assessment of threat from extreme geomagnetic storms, and (4) specific
assessments of predicted damage to large transformers
There are a couple of buzzwords: “GIC” means geomagnetically induced current, “MVAR”
is a mega unit of reactive power, and “EHV” (Extra high voltage) transformers. Previously we've discussed "coronal mass ejections" from solar storms (popularly called "solar flares", a bit of a simplification).
Here’s the “bottom line” (it sounds like an oncologist’s
prognosis): On P. 110 (Page 1 of Section
4), the paper states that a severe geomagnetic event could knock out 70% of the
nation’s power grid (an event many times the size of the August, 2003 outage in
the northeast), and that some sections of the country could face several months
without power. The risk is pervasive
throughout different latitudes, but the nature of risk becomes more diffuse
(related to “ring effects”) at more southerly latitudes. One significant problem is the logistical
difficulty in re-manufacturing and transporting EHV transformers, which are
huge and cannot be fit onto normal highways.
This was a bit of a problem in some parts of the mid-Atlantic in 2003
after Hurricane Isabel. Homeland
Security has a paper on the EHV issue here.
There were some outages in the US from the 1989 incident,
and they would have been severe from a similar event in 1921. The most severe known geomagnetic event in
history was the “Carrington” storm in 1859, before the nation had a power grid.
On P. 120, the paper compares its findings with those of the
NAS.
As with NAS, ORNL regards a major geomagnetic storm a much more
likely scenario than a high altitude EMP blast launched by a terrorist, and
perhaps less catastrophic, but still extremely damaging to the US (or to any
region of the world affected) economically.
Automobiles and personal electronics would probably not be affected by a
geomagnetic storm.
Geomagnetic storms have occurred during the lowest phase of
the sunspot cycle. The paper somewhat
disagree with opinions from other authorities (like NASA) that the danger is
necessarily greatest as sunspot activity increases in 2012 and 2013.
Wikipedia attribution link for picture of Knoxville, TN,
near Oak Ridge. I last visited the area
in October 1991, and previously in June 1988.
Tuesday, October 09, 2012
"No Easy Day" is an exciting read, of the raid that took out Bin Laden
Author: Mark Owen aka Matt Bissonnette, former US Navy Seal,
with Kevin Mauer
Title: “No Easy Day: The Autobiography of a Navy Seal”
Subtitle: “The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed
Osama bin Laden”
Publication: Dutton, 2012; ISBN 978-0—525-95372-2, 316
pages, hardcover, Nineteen chapters with Prologue and Epilogue
Amazon link:
Coordinated post: “60 Minutes” interview of author, covered
on TV blog, Sept. 10, 2012. That interview had identified the pseudonymous author
as part of “Seal Team 6” and second “in the bedroom”.
This is the second consecutive book I’ve reviewed where
there was some kind of “conflict of interest” or putative confidentiality violation
over its publication. This time, the government claims that the author should
have submitted the book through official channels for clearance of possible
disclosure of classified information. Owen denies that any such disclosure is
possible, It’s not clear that the
government has a legal case against him or will pursue one as of now.
I’ve had my own experience with book publishing and “conflict
of interest”, which I detail on my “BillBoushka” blog Sept. 27, 2010, and on my
“GLBT Issues Blog” October 8, 2012.
The author gives quite a bit of detail on training and on
how the expedition was carried out.
While it is fairly high-level, it may well be the case that it has
disclosed some important aspects of covert operations.
At the same time, I have to say it is an exciting read.
One of Owen’s important points is that apparently Osama bin
Laden did not try to defend himself at the end, and Owen sees that as a
contradiction of what he expect to find as part of the enemy’s own idea of “honor”. In this area, Owen’s detailed account of the
raid differs somewhat from other published accounts.
His earlier accounts of training, including that with DEVGRU
(United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group) is interesting, in its intensity and in the
fact that single men and those with families were treated exactly the
same. Unit cohesion and teamwork are
paramount, but the physical demands are so great that attention is never diverted. Owen never mentions the controversy over gays
or “don’t ask don’t tell”; and the environment is so demanding that it is hard
to imagine that it would come up. It
sounds unlikely, though, that the environment is in any way “homophobic”.
The way he found out about the mission is somewhat
happenstantial – he was a day late
getting to a training orientation in North Carolina, driving alone through 200
miles of coastal plain pine forest to ponder what was up.
He does discuss the presence of the female CIA analyst, whom
he calls Jen (or perhaps “Jenny”, as in “The Swiss Family Robinson”), and her
confidence that she had identified bin Laden’s “panic room” was absolute. The book, however, gives little idea as to
how the CIA really works to gather such information, or what a civilian analyst’s
job is really like.
I may be going on a limb to say this, but I do have a friend
in that agency, and he sent an email about wanting to go out and “club” before
an especially heavy weekend, as that weekend started. When I heard Sunday night that president Obama
would come on national TV, I “connected the dots” and thought that Qadaffi had suddenly fallen in Libya, because NATO had
suddenly attacked the day before (a convenient coincidence and diversion of
world attention). But even a happening like this shows how
innocuous remarks in emails or social media could possibly compromise a major
mission, because ordinary people (including bloggers) can try to make
inferences, and sometimes they’ll be right. It’s amazing how much information
people without clearances find out or can infer.
In his afterword, the author encourages people to work for
causes greater than themselves, and particularly to support veterans. It’s hard to work for “causes” without
replacing your own goals with those of other people, however.
NBC News has a story reporting on the secret CIA training site for the raid, here.
NBC News has a story reporting on the secret CIA training site for the raid, here.
Labels:
biography,
conflict of interest,
military issues
Monday, October 01, 2012
Bryan Craig's booklet "It's Her Fault": It got him fired from a school system, and he is suing; he does say something valuable
Author: Bryan Craig
Title: “It’s Her Fault”
Publication: Author House, ISBN 978-1-4772-5459-2, 8
chapters with Foreword and Afterword: 45 pages, paper.
Amazon link:
This little booklet has attracted controversy because its
author (he says “written by” on the cover) was fired (after first being suspended) from his job as
a guidance counselor and girls’ basketball coach at Rich Central High School in
Olympia Fields, IL. (near Chicago), after this self-published book
appeared. The “writer” is suing the
school district for $1 for wrongful termination, apparently based on his free
speech rights as a public employee. There
is a long history of litigation over where public speech rights of teachers or
school employees end – when it could interfere with instruction in the
classroom or discipline in the school. The
Huffington Post has a story about the matter (witn embedded interview of the author on CNN) here.
Most teacher firings in recent years have occurred over
social media, rather than published books.
But self-published books may seem to test the waters – as they don’t go
through as much oversight. Is there a
conflict of interest issue? I had to
deal with that myself when I self-pubbed my own “Do Ask Do Tell” book in 1997
because I was working for a company that specialized in selling life insurance
to military officers. (I'll be covering a principled controversy about a book by an ex Navy Seal here soon.) I can well imagine that some of his explicit comments about physical matters (below) could create the impression among students that he could be prejudiced against some of them -- leading to a legal variation of the "hostile workplace" problem, this time in a pubic school system.
The booklet, however brief, was valuable to me. Craig, who says he is married, starts out by describing courtship and subsequent marriage as a mental con game in which the man knows that the woman is “superior” in terms of potential brain power and stability (that was George Gilder’s argument in “Men and Marriage” back in the 1980s – see April 12, 2006), but needs to fool his own brain into believing that he has the upper hand in power games. In a 1993 book, Warren Farrell had made similar points, from a socially liberal perspective, in his "The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex" (Simon and Schuster). "Disposable" essentially means "fungible".
The booklet, however brief, was valuable to me. Craig, who says he is married, starts out by describing courtship and subsequent marriage as a mental con game in which the man knows that the woman is “superior” in terms of potential brain power and stability (that was George Gilder’s argument in “Men and Marriage” back in the 1980s – see April 12, 2006), but needs to fool his own brain into believing that he has the upper hand in power games. In a 1993 book, Warren Farrell had made similar points, from a socially liberal perspective, in his "The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex" (Simon and Schuster). "Disposable" essentially means "fungible".
All of this might not be so controversial (conservatives go
along with most of it), but then Craig gets quite explicit about some intimate matters,
especially those primary sexual characteristics of women that (he says) makes
women more “satisfying” to the egos of men.
He gets quite explicit as to race.
Now some stuff like this (more about the “secondary characteristics”) I
used to hear young men talk about in college dorms and Army barracks during my
own coming of age, so it is nothing new.
But the level to which he takes this heterosexual fetishism is new to
me.
As a gay man, I don’t experience what he describes, but I
experience something comparable, with respect to “the secondaries”, about other
men (as was an issue with my "therapy" at NIH in 1962). Maybe that helps support the idea
that sexual orientation is immutable.
Psychologists (and conservative writers like George Gilder) call this
process “upward affiliation”, and cast it in a negative light. The implication is that a man will not be
able to love anyone (or at least remain in love for a lifetime of marriage) who
does not feed his ego by being “good enough”.
Ever heard the phrase, “He can do better than that?” Craig at one point uses the phrase, “You do
the math.” There’s still deeper point,
too: should our ability to experience compassion and participate in reinforcing
the social capital of others depend on our “having what we want” in our own
relationships first? I have the impression that the healthiest marriages were not predicated on prerequisites of ego satisfaction (I don't think this was true of my parents, married for 45 years).
Craig (whose picture shows him to be African-American), by the way, is quite explicit that men ought to play
the field before marriage. (Our acronym
in Army barracks was “SIBM”.) The old religious idea of reserving sexuality for
marriage with one person can’t possibly work, in his view.
Here’s YouTube video by “Interactive Healing” in which the
speaker discusses the authors’ “objectification of women and girls”. But should psychological traits revealed in
published writings disqualify one from working in a public school system?
For my own experience with this issue, see my “BillBoushka”
blog, entry on July 27, 2007.
The booklet is inexpensive to download to Kindle, but a but pricey for its length in hardcopy (it's done by print-on-demand).
Last picture: from a Hooters (restroom sign) in Waco, TX.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Aaron Belkin and the Palm Center: "How We Won": Kindle Book traces the history of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and its ultimate repeal
Author: Aaron Belkin
Title: "How We Won: Progressive Lessons from the Repeal of ‘Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell’"
Publication: Kindle, from The Huffington Post Media Group,
ASIN: B0005NDLMVK, 108 pages, ten chapters
Amazon link.
I was able to find this book only on Kindle; no hardcopy
seems available. I don’t know whether it
would work on the Barnes and Noble Nook device.
So I finally bought a Kindle, which up to now I had not needed. I find it a little distracting that the
Kindle needs its own wireless access; why not just download everything on the
laptop and migrate using the USB port?
Amazon lists the book as 108 pages, but they seem to be two columns per
page; one page on the Kindle is really
one column only, so the real length was 216.
The book is timely, as on Sept. 20, 2012, “we” will mark the
first anniversary of the full repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
Dr. Belkin is a professor of political science at San
Francisco State University, and previous was an associate professor at the
University of California, Santa Barbara and previously, the City University of
New York.
In the 1990s, Belkin headed the Center for the Study of
Sexual Minorities in the Military (CSSM), which became the Palm Center a years ago,
always hosted at the Santa Barbara campus (link).
In February 2002, shortly after my own “forced retirement”
from my final “legacy employer”, I met
Dr. Belkin at his office during a trip to California. I had sent him my own “Do Ask Do Tell: a Gay Conservative Lashes Back” book,
and in his office, effectively the CSSM office at the time, he housed a large
physical library of books on matters pertaining to the military gay ban and the
“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy.
Dr. Belkin did tell me how difficult it was to get major
media outlets to take the DADT issue seriously, now that it was overwhelmed by
the more obvious issues associated with 9/11.
I do remember my conversation with him.
Let me say at the outset, I am impressed with the amount of
historical detail – of the military ban
since 1993 -- in this relatively short work.
It is a good complement to Randy Shilts’s “Conduct Unbecoming” which
stops in 1993. (But it needs to be
available in print.) . It’s important to note here that Palm Center has helped
published two other books in the interim: one is Dr. Belkin’s own "Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military" (2003, Lynne Rienner), and
Nathaniel Frank, “Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and
Weakens America” (2009, St. Martins), reviewed on this blog March 11, 2009).
Of course, Belkin’s position will be that his own effort
(and that of people he hired and contacted) was crucial to the repeal. The book suggests that it would be very
difficult for a future hostile (GOP?) president and Congress to undo the repeal
and reimplement the military ban (maybe the “Old Ban” of 1981 with “asking”). However, in recent press stories, Dr. Belkin
has indeed expressed this concern (see my GLBT issues blog, Sept. 9, 2012.
Belkin starts his book by laying out what he sees as the
right arguments to attack. While progressive activists concern themselves with
fairness and equality, the productive argument is to show that the practice of
banning gays does not contribute to military effectiveness; it may be
counterproductive or even dangerous. Abstract ideas about morality are not the
issue.
Belkin does, however, quickly get on to the most conspicuous
early arguments made back in 1993, that allowing gays to serve (at least “open”
gays) violated “privacy” in the barracks where a degree of forced “homosocial”
intimacy must occur. Over time, this
argument has gotten overlaid with a more nebulous notion of “unit cohesion”, as
was explained in the 2011 HBO Film “The Strange History of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t
Tell’”, movies blog, Oct. 13, 2011). Belkin sees this argument as morphing into
a more generalized moral disapproval of homosexuality (or of homosexuals as people). Indeed, as he points to writings by Elaine
Donnelly (of the “Center for Military
Readiness”) which “warn” that acceptance of gays in the US military would tend
to promote of homosexuality in civilian society at large. (Belkin mentions Republican Senator Alan Simpson as once saying that gays [relative to procreation] weren't part of the "human family" but then changing his attitude and agreeing that the ban should be lifted.) That corresponds to my own theory (as in my
own 1997 book) that the military, because it has had the ability to conscript
men in the past (as with me, during the Vietnam era) has a lot of influence on
the moral culture of a society as whole, particularly in nebulous ideas about
duty and obligation (outside of normal parameters of choice and personal
responsibility) and how these ideas about social (familial, tribal, communal,
religious) cohesion (as an expansion of “unit cohesion”) affect those
individuals who grow up being “different”.
Belkin, for example, points out that the whole “stop-loss”
policy, practically a backdoor draft (and the “Individual Ready Reserve” clause
signed at enlistment) might have been unnecessary
during the “second Iraq War” (and post 9/11 war in Afghanistan) had all the gay
discharges not occurred. He also
discusses the security threat in the loss of linguists, which could have been a
contributing factor in failing to stop 9/11 (although Jesse Ventura has other
ideas on this matter!) I reviewed
Paramount’s film “Stop-Loss” on my movies blog March 29, 2008.
A major part of Belkin’s narrative concerns the effort of
his group to get articles written in major media sources by major columnists
and also by others with obvious expertise and stakes, like retired
military. He says this was difficult,
and he provides interesting observations on how the Associated Press, in
particular, works. (I’ve covered AP
issues on my main blog in conjunction with copyright controversies on the
Internet.) He had to “watch his step”,
since more military officers seemed to favor the ban at first, although
gradually changed their views. After
Barack Obama became president in 2009, Belkin got into disagreements with SLDN
(Servicemembers Legal Defense Network) over whether there was the political
will in Congress to support direct repeal.
Belkin supported a plan that Obama issue an Executive Order to stop
enforcement. Even the White House
expressed misgivings about the legal or constitutional logic of Belkin’s
suggestion. Belkin also disagreed with
Log Cabin Republicans over the wisdom of litigation, but in the end, LCR turned
out to be right, as the lower court’s decision effectively nullifying the law
put pressure on Congress to agree to a staged repeal.
The later part of 2010 saw initial disappointment with the
likelihood of repeal., until activists (with the help of Senator Joe Lieberman,
whose view on lifting the ban had become much more supportive over the recent
years since 9/11 and the linguists’ fiasco) came up with the idea of a
stand-alone repeal bill, during the lame duck session in December.
I personally attended the mid-day rally at the Capitol side
(near Union Station) on December 10, about when the bill was introduced. As I got off the Metro to go, right to the
rally event, I got a call from a caregiver at home (in suburb an Arlington VA)
that my own mother had suddenly gotten much worse and would not survive more
than a few hours. I stayed for the rally
(hearing Michele Benecke, who had headed up SLDN, speaking almost immediately),
and after I got home Hospice was taking her to the Hospice facility for her
final four days. She lived just long enough for a lifelong project of
mine to come to fruition., and then, at age 97, let go.
We all know of what would follow, the surveys and the “certification
process” that would finally end in formal repeal September 20. And, I have to admit, I am concerned about
what could happen if social conservatism takes control of the White House and
Congress, and then blames or scapegoats the nation’s economic ills on the
visibility and personal values of those who are different.
There’s another interesting embedded story in the book about
the late Northwestern University sociology professor Charles Moskos, who had,
along with Sam Nunn, raised the “privacy” issue in the barracks back in
1993. He says that, during most of his
activity in the past decade, Moskos cast doubt on repeal. Yet, shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Moskos
argued for restoration of the military draft (to include women), as had some
others, such as Sen. Levin of Michigan.
I got into an email conversation with Moskos then (I was living in
Minneapolis at the time), who wrote to me “Gays should get behind
conscription. Then the ban would be
lifted.”
In fact, SLDN told me, sometime later, by email, that it was
looking into the ramifications of the possible restoration of the military
draft. As I noted above, it has always
seemed to me that a combination of conscription and a ban together provides an
excuse for making gays second-class citizens in civilian life (and for denying
security clearances), which was the world in which I had grown up. But, of course, when we had a draft, the
military was actually more concerned that people would use it to get out of
military service, and it tended to look the other way during the Vietnam era on
concerns over gay soldiers. (The Navy
even at first tried to resist discharging Keith Meinhold when he outed himself,
but did so under political and public pressure.)
Moskos had, in fact, at one time paid attention to the issue
of gay students in college dorms, and argued that they should be
segregated. It was roommate issues that
catalyzed my own expulsion from William and Mary in 1961.
Belkin also notes the Veterans Administration made a goof in
1996 by calling homosexuality a mental illness in trying to deny some veterans
benefits.
I found this debate (85 minutes) from early 2012 of a debate
between Aaron Belkin and Elaine Donnelly on DADT at Maxwell Air Force Base on
YouTube.
I haven’t watched it yet – time considerations. Note that the debate takes place in Alabama.
Here's the link to a Wikipedia picture of UCSB.
Here's the link to a Wikipedia picture of UCSB.
Monday, September 17, 2012
"It's Simple": Collection of essays by Dean Hannotte, for the Paul Rosenfels Community
Author: Dean Hannotte, with Introduction by Rachel Bartlett
Title: “It’s Simple: Ordinary Common-sense Explanations for
Everything You Haven’t Figured Out Yet”
Publication:
CreateSpace Independent Publishing. ISBN-13 978-1477670767, paper, 144
pages, indexed, four parts.
Amazon link:
Dean Hannotte and Rachel Bartlett run the online presence
for the Paul Rosenfels Community, which followed (or descended from) the Ninth Street Center that
Dean and Paul Rosenfels formed in 1973 in the East Village in NYC. The “Community”
link (“Social progress through personal
growth) is here.
There is a review here on April 12, 2006 of Paul Rosenfels’s
core “dissertation”, “Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process
(1972), to which Dean appended a strong introduction to a 1986 reprinting by
the Ninth Street Center.
This book comprises about thirty-two (by my count) short
essays about everyday “perceptions” and the pieces come across as a bit like
blog posts. They would correspond more
to Chopin’s etudes than his preludes. The first “part” asks “What is life? What am I
doing here?”; the second goes on to psychology, the third to what matters in
life, and the last, to where we are going.
The very first chapter asks “what is natural?”
The overall philosophy is pragmatic (as one can judge from
the title). People make up religious or
political agendas that control others because of their own cravings for
self-aggrandizement.
What matters to the author is life and personal growth on
Earth, not who “created” us or where we may go afterward.
Toward the end, however, the chapters do get more
metaphysical. At one point, the author
discusses the progression in science from physics, to chemistry, to biology, to
social sciences, each stage less deterministic and more macroscopic than
before. I recall a lesson like this in a
middle school text when I was substitute-teaching. The larger the level, the more important free
will, individual consciousness, and psychology become.
There is a midpoint chapter that compares the difficulties of writing fiction, non-fiction (like my "Do Ask Do Tell"), textbooks, and poetry. I think that fiction is the hardest. Poetry -- you need the gift for verse (and for comedy, like that of Seth Meyers).
There is a midpoint chapter that compares the difficulties of writing fiction, non-fiction (like my "Do Ask Do Tell"), textbooks, and poetry. I think that fiction is the hardest. Poetry -- you need the gift for verse (and for comedy, like that of Seth Meyers).
The author certainly takes a skeptical view of religious
ideas of an afterlife, creation, intelligent design, and the like. There is a degree of objectivism in the
writings. Absolute equality cannot exist
in nature. Socially and politically, it
is a goal that is necessary to provide a climate stable enough for people to
explore personal growth. The author discusses two films in conjunction with
personal growth: “Sundays and Cybele (1959)”, and “Splendor and the Grass”
(1961), the second of which I saw during my lost freshman semester at William
and Mary.
On the issue of “afterlife”, I have to agree, what matters
is how well one lives here – and that takes on a certain objective reality
which can be destroyed by misfortune or by the wrongful actions of others, somewhat dependent on luck, and regardless of whether justice is done. Really, there are no "victims". I
personally think that consciousness must persist somehow (maybe time stops and
we stay in our last moment forever, so it had better be blissful) – and I don’t
think that, even given a concept like Christian Grace, we simply live forever
(with “family”) in a condo in Clive Barker’s First Dominion.
Dean has a chapter “Are gay brains different from straight
brains?” and offers the idea that sexual orientation might change the brain
physiologically – reversing the usual argument.
I would like to take this point and expand and suggest a few other possible essays – I’ll
be writing them at one time or another. But
a big problem is that it is very difficult to sequence my thoughts in any structure that would resemble a mathematical argument or proof (like in graduate school). So I'll argue "inside out".
For example, why do gay activists insist that sexual
orientation is immutable? Such
insistence hints that there is something intrinsically wrong with homosexual
attraction if it is somehow willful.
So why have, historically, many (maybe most) cultures
persecuted homosexuals for what is normally seen as private “victimless”
activity, often pursuing it more than heterosexual infidelity? Ok, “it’s simple” – religion. But that only begs more questions.
I can give a particular glimpse because of my own stance as
an only child. I will not be able to give
my parents a lineage. Many marriages
probably depend on this sort of hope for sexual interest to persist as a couple
ages together.
There’s a deeper issue, that I can come back to after going
beyond the issue of sexual orientation and look at the broader drive for
self-expression and recognition – especially for someone with my personal bent,
which seeks a psychic reward not only in discovering but sometimes in exposing “inconvenient
truths” about the conventional drives of others (which get discussed in the
book a lot). This issue looks further to
the position of those who seem “different” in society, and asks why society
sometimes goes after and bullies its outliers. That question is much broader than just why
homosexuals have been “oppressed”.
It’s easy to come up with “simple” reasons. Many people see life in terms of mastering
social combat, and see “those who are different” as suitable for
subjugation. Nature often works that
way. More relevant, many sees the “difference-people”
as threats, who can and will expose their own weaknesses.
There’s a particular aspect of this that has surfaced in the
Internet area (or era): people can draw
attention to themselves for their speech or artistry (or auteruship, perhaps)
on the Web, without necessarily being open to taking personal responsibility
for others in a conventional way, which for people like me, can involve a lot
of risk and dealing with a lot of shame (to be distinguished from guilt) after “falling
short”.
Taking responsibility for others, for someone with my
history, can be a particularly daunting task.
I have been brought up to abhor competitive failure. It seems as though “society” wanted me to
perform competitively “as a man” and when I didn’t, it tried to back down a bit
and still interest me in conventional marriage and fatherhood – because if I
remained single and visible (and didn't add personally to "social capital") I could really become a “threat”. (Society has often viewed “failures” as
expendable or as cannon fodder – look at how we handled the draft during the
Vietnam era.) There is a logical
breakdown in thinking here, somewhere.
It seems as though sometimes I am challenged to “give up” my own
expressive goals to take care of others and learn fellowship with them, when
the whole process of interacting with “them” earlier in life simply was
humiliating. All the normal protective “feelings”
for family members – connected to conventional heterosexual attraction and an
expectation that one will pass one’s lineage on to children – come to seem repulsive.
Fantasy, based on finding angelic perfection, takes its place. I'm particularly "offended" in situations where I am expected to intervene personally to make someone else seem "all right".
It seems that “society” does have a practical “vested
interest” in maintaining a culture where people will be able and inclined to
make an maintain emotional bonds that actually respond to real need and augment
the welfare of other members in an extended family, which is set up (ideally)
by married parents. People like me
refuse to show emotion (or experience it) when it is normally expected. Whole moral philosophies (particularly the “camel’s
eye” metaphor in the Gospels) grow around this sort of experience. This capacity for "aethetically realistic" love, as a moral requirement (quite possible in same-sex "polarities" context), seems to arrive as a corollary of the need to make every human being in a civilization (that is, all of "the people") "valuable". It’s easier for a lot of people to develop
emotionally in a “communal” sense when they believe everyone else has to (and when no one is allowed to depend on the crutch of upward affiliation). Totalitarian systems get set up to feed on
this need. One of Dean’s chapters, “Why
are some cultures better than others” gives some interesting history about the
connections of Paul’s family to communism.
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